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György Cziffra

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Christian Georges Cziffra (; 5 November 192115 January 1994) was a Hungarian-French virtuoso pianist and composer. He is considered to be one of the greatest virtuoso pianists of the twentieth century. Among his teachers was Ernő Dohnányi, a pupil of István Thoman, who was a favourite pupil of Franz Liszt. Born in Budapest, he became a French national in 1968. Cziffra is known for his recordings of works of Franz Liszt, Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann, and also for his technically demanding arrangements or paraphrases of several orchestral works for the piano, including Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee and Johann Strauss II’s The Blue Danube. Cziffra left a sizeable body of recordings. He lived in Senlis, a commune northeast of Paris, where he ran a foundation for young musicians and artists. Early years Cziffra was born to a poor Romani family of musicians in Budapest in 1921. In his memoirs, Cziffra describes his father, a player of the cimbalom, as “a cabaret artist”. The family lived in poverty. His father, Gyula was unemployed, and the family income was earned by Cziffra’s mother Ilona and his elder sister, Jolán. His parents had lived in Paris before Worl

György Kósa

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

György Kósa (24 April 1897 – 16 August 1984) was a Hungarian composer. Life and career György Kósa was born in Budapest, Hungary on 24 April 1897. He began studying music with Béla Bartók when he was ten years old. From 1908-1912 he attended the Franz Liszt Academy of Music where he was a student of music composition with Zoltán Kodály, and Victor von Herzfeld. He also studied piano at that conservatory from 1908 through 1915, and later was a piano student of Ernst von Dohnányi in 1915-1916. Kósa worked at the Hungarian State Opera as a répétiteur in 1916-1917; notably serving in that capacity for the premiere production of Bartok’s opera The Wooden Prince (1917). After World War I, he gave tours of Europe and North Africa before ultimately settling in Tripoli, Libya where he worked as a pit orchestra conductor in the city’s theaters for two years. He returned to Hungary, and in 1927 joined the faculty of his alma mater, the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, as a professor of piano. He taught there for many years. Kósa was awarded the Ferenc Erkel Prize in (1955), and was later honored by the Hungarian People’s Republic as a Merited Artist and a Honoured Artist in 1972. Kósa died in Bu

György Kurtág

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

György Kurtág (; born 19 February 1926) is a Hungarian composer of contemporary classical music and pianist. Kurtág was an academic teacher of piano at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music from 1967, later also of chamber music, and taught until 1993. For decades, Kurtág and his wife Márta gave recitals on one piano of selections from his ten-volume collection Játékok and his Bach transcriptions. Life and career György Kurtág was born on 19 February 1926 in Lugoj, Romania, to Jewish Hungarian parents. He spoke Hungarian, Romanian, and German early. From the age of 14, he took piano lessons from Magda Kardos and studied composition with Max Eisikovits in Timișoara. He moved to Budapest in 1946 and became a Hungarian citizen in 1948. There, he began his studies at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, where he met his wife, Márta Kinsker, as well as composer György Ligeti, who became a close friend. His piano teacher at the academy was Pál Kadosa. He studied composition with Sándor Veress and Ferenc Farkas, chamber music with Leó Weiner, and theory with Lajos Bárdos, and graduated in piano and chamber music in 1951. He married Márta in 1947 and their son was born in 1954. He received his deg

György Ligeti

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Early life#

Ligeti was born in 1923 at Diciosânmartin (Dicsőszentmárton; renamed to Târnăveni in 1941) in Romania, to Dr. Sándor Ligeti and Dr. Ilona Somogyi. His family was Hungarian Jewish. He was the great-grandnephew of violinist Leopold Auer and second cousin of Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller. Some sources say he was Auer’s grandnephew, rather than great-grandnephew. Ligeti recalled that his first exposure to languages other than Hungarian came one day while listening to a conversation between Romanian-speaking town police. Before that, he didn’t know that other languages existed. He moved to Cluj with his family when he was six years old. He did not return to the town of his birth until the 1990s. In 1940, Northern Transylvania became part of Hungary following the Second Vienna Award, thus Cluj became part of Hungary as well. In 1941 Ligeti received his initial musical training at the conservatory in Kolozsvár (Cluj), He studied under Pál Kadosa, Ferenc Farkas, Zoltán Kodály and Sándor Veress. He conducted ethnomusicological research into the Hungarian folk music of Transylvania. However, after a year he returned to Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, this time as a teacher of harmony, counterpoint, and musical analysis. He secured this position with the help of Kodály and held it from 1950 to 1956. As a young teacher, Ligeti took the unusual step of regularly attending the lectures of an older colleague, the conductor, and musicologist Lajos Bárdos, a conservative Christian whose circle represented a safe haven for Ligeti. The composer acknowledged Bárdos’s help and advice in the prefaces to his two harmony textbooks (1954 and 1956). Due to the restrictions of the communist government, communications between Hungary and the West by then had become difficult, and Ligeti and other artists were effectively cut off from recent developments outside the Eastern Bloc.

György Orbán

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

György Orbán (born 12 July 1947 in Târgu Mureș, Romania) is a Romanian-born Hungarian composer. Biography György Orbán was born in Târgu Mureș, Romania on July 12, 1947. He studied music composition with Sigismund Toduță and Max Eisikovits and music theory with János Jagamas at the Cluj-Napoca Academy of Music where he was a student from 1968 through 1973. After completing his studies, he joined the faculty of that school where he taught both music theory and counterpoint for six years. In 1979 Orbán emigrated from Romania to Hungary when he accepted a position as a music editor with the music publisher Editio Musica Budapest. He remained in that position through 1990. In 1982 he became a professor of music theory and composition at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music. In 1989 his avant-garde music composition Triple Sextet (1979) received honors at the in Paris. While his earlier music embraced the avant-garde style, he moved away from this beginning in the mid-1980s into a neo-Romantic aesthetic. In 1991 he was awarded the Bartók-Pásztory Prize. Works, editions, recordings Recordings Monographs * Orban: Hungarian Passion. Bartók Béla Chorus and University Orchestra dir. Gábor Baross

György Ránki

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

György Ránki (; 30 November 1907 – 22 May 1992) was a Hungarian composer. Life Born in Budapest, he studied composition with Zoltán Kodály at the Budapest Academy of Music from 1926-1930. He became interested in folk music and ethnomusicology, working with László Lajtha at the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest and later further studies in Asian folk music in London and Paris (at the Musée de l’Homme). He directed the music section of Hungarian radio in 1947–8, after which he gave his attention to composition. Ránki not only employed authentic folk melodies and musical idioms in his music but also pulled on jazz elements. He possessed a gift for the grotesque and unusual, the colourful and humorous, which may be traced in part perhaps to his studies of non-Western music. Works His greatest successes have been stage works, above all the opera Pomádé király uj ruhája (‘King Pomádé’s New Clothes’, based on the Andersen story), which draws most of its material from Hungarian folk music. He also wrote a two-act mystery opera, Az ember tragédiája (The Tragedy of Man), based on the eponymous play by Imre Madách. South Asian influences are particularly evident in Pentaerophonia for wind qui

Gyp Mills

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Gyp Mills (born David John Mills, 9 July 1946 – 18 June 2019), also known as Gypsy Dave, was an English sculptor and songwriter. He was first in the public eye as the companion to the singer-songwriter, Donovan. He was also a well-known sculptor with studios in Greece and Thailand. Early years Mills was born in Peckham Rye, London, before moving to Hertfordshire. In his early days in Hertfordshire he became friends with many art students, including Dave Richards, Julian McAllister and Donovan. In 1963 he made a pivotal journey to St. Ives, Cornwall with Donovan. He lost touch with Donovan and moved around the UK including Manchester and Nottingham. In late 1964 Donovan had been signed up to a record label and asked Mills to accompany him on his first tour with his other friends Mac MacLeod and John Lock. Donovan wrote “To Try for the Sun” and “Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness)” about his time with Mills. Mills was tour manager for Donovan for many years, and appeared alongside Donovan in the TV film, A Boy Called Donovan. In 1968 they both journeyed to be with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and The Beatles in Rishikesh, India. Mills wrote a few songs which appeared on Donovan’s album, The Hurd

Gyula Dávid

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Gyula Dávid (6 May 1913 – 14 March 1977) was a Hungarian violist and composer. Life and career Gyula Dávid was born in Budapest, Hungary on 6 May 1913. He studied composition with Zoltán Kodály at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music (FLAM) where he began his studies with the composer in 1938. He assisted Kodály with folk song collecting and a song he collected in Karád was utilized by Kodály as the basis for his composition Karádi nóták. Selected works ;Orchestral * Symphony No. 1 (I. szimfónia) (1947) * Tánczene, magyar népdalfeldolgozások (Dance Music, Based on Hungarian Folk Songs) (published 1952) * Symphony No. 2 (II. szimfónia) (1957) * Symphony No. 3 (III. szimfónia) (1960) * Sinfonietta for small orchestra (1961) * Színházi zene (Theatrical Music; Theatermusik) (published 1963) * Symphony No. 4 (IV. szimfónia) (1970) * Festive Overture (Ünnepi előjáték) (1972) ;Concertante * Concerto (Brácsaverseny) for viola and orchestra (1950) * Concerto (Hegedűverseny) for violin and orchestra (published 1970) * Concerto (Kürtverseny) for horn and orchestra (published 1976) ;Chamber music * Wind Quintet No. 1 (I. Fúvósötös) (published 1954) * Sonata (Sonata fuvolára és zongorára) for flute

Gyuli Kambarova

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Gyuli Nizamievna Kambarova (Russian: Гюли Низамиевна Камбарова; 9 May 1982, Makhachkala, Russia) is a Dagestan and Russian composer who is a member of the Union of Composers of Russian Federation, member of the International Alliance for Women in Music, member of the Music Teachers National Association, and member of the Songwriters Guild of America. She authored the music for the documentaries “You Are Not Alone”, “Voice for the Voiceless” and Fine Line directed by Anna Barsukova. She lives and works in United States. Biography Gyuli Kambarova was born on May 9, 1982, in the city of Makhachkala in Republic of Dagestan, Russia. During her early music studies, she won several youth piano competitions, including I. S. Bach competition - II prize, G. Hasanov competition - II prize, and E. Grieg competition - III prize. In 1996, she started to study piano at the Makhachkala College of Music named after Gotfrid Hasanov with Svetlana Papayan. In 1999 she entered the Lyceum of Music at the Rostov State Conservatory named after Sergei Rachmaninoff. She graduated from the Rostov State Conservatory with degrees in piano performance (2005; Professor Natalia Simonova) and composition with hono