Bartók-135 delegates in Berlin, Vienna and Warsaw

9 January 2017

Three new cities have joined the list of sites celebrating Bartók’s oeuvre with festive events: some of the academic staff and students of the Liszt Academy visited Berlin, Warsaw and Vienna to divulge the secrets of Bartók’s music through workshops and give concerts featuring Bartók and his followers.

In Berlin, the delegates had the opportunity to do so on two separate occasions, as the Liszt Academy had arranged to join forces with both leading art academies of the city. Between 29 November and 1 December, the pianist and professor of Chamber Music Department of the Liszt Academy Gábor Csalog delivered a masterclass to the students of Prof Brigitte Wollenweber at the Hans Eisler School of Music on Bartók’s and his followers’, Ligeti and Kurtág’s works.  To close the course, Gábor Csalog and the attendees of the masterclass gave a joint public concert featuring the discussed pieces. At the other Berlin site, at the Berlin University of the Arts, András Almási-Tóth, associate professor of the Department of Vocal and Opera Studies, gave a masterclass on the interpretation and better understanding of Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and some of the composer’s songs.

As a guest of the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw on 2-3 December, the pianist Gábor Eckhardt gave a two-day course on Bartók’s piano compositions enriched with the lecture The Microcosmos and the folk music motifs in Bartók’s piano pieces. This popular and professionally highly acclaimed event made the ties between the two institutions even closer, which will manifest itself in a series of future cooperation projects.

The Liszt Academy has been working intensely together with its Viennese partner institution, the Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Wien, thus it was a special treat that during this programme series the two academies could pay tribute to Bartók in a joint concert. The Hungarian delegates of this event were the pianists László Borbély and Imre Dani, who performed the selected pieces in the concert hall of the Hungarian Embassy in Vienna on 13 December.  The singularity of the event lay in the colourful programme and the unique arrangement: Viennese musicians (Katarina Andjelkovic, Kuan-Wie Huang and members of the Simply Quartet) played Bartók’s oeuvres, while the Hungarian artistis performed works by Bartók’s contemporaries, Berg, Schönberg and Strauss.     

Click here to read more about the programme series and its sites.