6 composers, 3 singers, 3 instrumentalists, and 1 conductor: Out at S.E.A. is a joint project supervised by Péter Eötvös, Luca Francesconi and Balázs Horváth and supported by the Peter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation and the Budapest Music Center. After performances in Budapest and Milan the French premiere takes places at IRCAM in Paris on July 9.

Out at S.E.A came into being as the result of a unique process, a combination of a composition workshop, a competition for composers, and a complex final phase of assembling the parts and creating and rehearsing the final result, a chamber opera. Or, rather, a double chamber opera, as the same libretto is set to music in two independent versions.

János Vajda (1949) has always been highly acclaimed for his vocal output. His Mario and the Magician and Leonce and Lena founded his fame as the leading Hungarian opera composer of the last decades. But his contribution to Latin sacred music is equally substantial, his Magnificat, Pater noster and Mass in B having been his main achievements so far.

His Requiem for mixed choir and organ was composed in 2012 and premiered on 10th May 2014 by its dedicatees, the Canticum Novum Chamber Choir in Debrecen, directed by Ágnes Török. The piece has eight movements, and its peculiarity is that unlike Mozart but similarly to Fauré’s Requiem the piece does not include an Offertorium; however, Lux aeterna is followed by a Libera me and an In Paradisum movement. On the other hand, Vajda set to music the dramatic Medieval sequentia Dies irae, missing from Fauré’s Requiem. In any case, these differences are permitted by the flexibility of the liturgy.

The second edition of "Clara Peia" International Piano Competition organized at György Kurtág's hometown Lugoj on 25-26th April is dedicated to children between 5-13 years old.  Editio Musica Budapest and Budapest Music Center offered a special prize "György Kurtág" (The eight books and CD recordings of Játékok) for the best performance of a contemporary piece.

The work da capo for cimbalom and ensemble was composed in winter 2013-2014 at the invitation of Porto’s Casa da Musica, the Salzburg Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum and New World Symphony, America’s Orchestral Academy (Miami). The cimbalom solo was inspired by the performance of Hungarian cimbalom player Miklós Lukács.

The concerto was composed in 2012, inspired by István Várdai’s play and is dedicated to him. The triple movement structure and the character of the movements follow the patterns of classical concertos, while the thematic connections spanning the movements rather reflect the structural principles of Romantic symphonies.

Ensemble arTrium (Steffi Mölle – flute, Odile Skarnes – viola, Zsuzsanna Aba-Nagy – harp) gives the Austrian premiere of Symmetry-Asymmetry by Balázs Horváth at the Alte Schmiede in Vienna on March 19.

More about the concert.

THReNSeMBle also performes pieces by Marcell Dargay, Péter Tornyai, Rafal Zapala and Pierre Boulez. Waiting for... by balázs Horváth and Summer Music by László Tihanyi will be premiered in Poland by THReNSeMBle and Balázs Horváth at the 43. Poznańska wiosna muzyczna, Poznań Festival on 22 March.

More about the concert and the festival.

This winter term the curriculum of the Opera School of the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart included György Kurtág’s song cycle Messages of the Late Miss R. V. Troussova and Alexander von Zemlinsky’s chamber opera Der Zwerg. To mark the end of term they will be performed for the public on five occasions at the Wilhelma Theater between 8 and 16 February. The lead part in Kurtág’s work will be sung by the students divided according to the three parts of the cycle. The story on stage woven round the cycle focusses on passion, futile yearning and hopelessness expressed in music and verse. The instrumental parts will be played by the chamber orchestra of the college.
 
For more about the performance please click here.

Péter Eötvös celebrated his 70th birthday on 2 January while László Vidovszky will be 70 on 25 February. The careers of the two composers are connected at several points, given their coinciding years of studies and the beginning of their careers, and also their joint work in the Budapest New Music Studio, their friendship and mutual friends. 

The concert in the Budapest Music Center on 30 March features Shadows (1996) by Péter Eötvös, composed for flute and chamber ensemble, and Reverb (2011) by László Vidovszky, written for piano and string quartet. The programme will also include the Hungarian premieres of two works (Stockhausen: Schlagtrio and Messiaen: Un vitrail et des oiseaux) whose composers played an important part at the start of their careers. The UMZE Ensemble is conducted by Zoltán Rácz.

Composer Sándor Szokolay passed away on 8 December 2013 at the age of 83. Members of his family, students and admirers bid their final farewell in the Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Cemetery in the town of Sopron on 21 December.

Sándor Szokolay was born in Kunágota (in the southeast of Hungary) on 30 March, 1931. He studied composition with Ferenc Szabó and Ferenc Farkas at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music between 1950 and 1957. While still studying, he taught solfege in the framework of the Budapest Music School Organization. From 1955 to 1961 he was member of the editorial staff of the Hungarian Radio, then he was working as a freelance composer for some years. From 1966 to his retirement in 1994 he was professor of composition, counterpoint, and prosody at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music. He also took the position of music reader of the Hungarian Television between 1977 and 1988. He has actively participated in the activity of severalorganizations, among them the Hungarian Kodály Society, the Hungarian Music Chamber, the Hungarian National Foundation and the Hungarian Radio Foundation.

The chairman of the Royal Philharmonic Society, John Gilhooly, described the concert given by György and Márta Kurtág in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on 1 December as a significant event in music history. In the first half of the recital Hiromi Kikuchi performed the eight-movement Hipartita for solo violin, which the composer had dedicated to the musician. After the interval, György and Márta Kurtág played a selection of solo and four-handed pieces from Games and Kurtág’s Bach transcriptions. Compositions which had originally been written as a homage, gift or message in sounds to colleagues and friends featured significantly in the ‘composed ’ programme that was performed without intermission. The Kurtágs played on an upright piano with the ‘quiet’ pedal always depressed. The instrument’s sound was amplified only to the extent that in the jam-packed hall accommodating 900 people everyone would feel the intensity of the soft sounds and could enter the magic world revealed by the playing of the two exceptional musicians. Their performance and the encore, a four-handed Schumann piece, received a standing ovation.