On the spot – Chamber Music Workshop A Zeneakadémia saját szervezésű programja

Chamber music is generally held to be the genre of classical music of the highest order, which, with the assistance of the most refined and most complex musical tools, opens the door onto a transcendent plane. The string quartets of Beethoven and Bartók, the quintets of Brahms and the trios of Mozart all define this tradition, not to mention Goethe’s highly influential definition of a quartet, according to which the string quartet – and we might add all ‘true’ chamber music – is in fact nothing less than “four rational people conversing”. Chamber music has been extremely important from the very beginning of the Liszt Academy, and undoubtedly the most important figure in the history of the institution in this respect was Leó Weiner, who taught chamber music from 1923, and whose workshop, which operated virtually as an independent institution within the academy, turned out students such as Georg Solti, Antal Doráti, Tibor Varga, Dénes Kovács, Albert Simon, János Starker, György Kurtág – and this list could continue for a lot longer. So the fact that the chamber music workshop is once again functioning in the Liszt Academy, under the leadership of András Keller, and that a significant slice of the concerts being staged in the renovated Grand Hall are chamber recitals, is sufficient cause for celebration of the fact that even in the 21st century there are still rational people willing to converse with each other. In this concert, which introduces the workshop, three key chamber music teachers of the Academy, Gábor Csalog, Balázs Fülei and András Keller, take to the stage of the Grand Hall to give – in partnership with their students – a taste of the work that goes on behind the scenes.