Sunday 26 September 2021, 19.30 

FOCUS ON CHAMBER MUSIC

Subotica Synagogue (Trg. Jakaba i Komora 6, Subotica 24000, Serbia) 

Programme:

Franz Liszt: Festive Polonaise – for piano, four hands
Károly Goldmark : Suite No. 1 for violin and piano Op. 11

INTERVAL

Béla Bartók: Evening in the Village – transcription for clarinet and piano
Béla Kovács: Hommage à Kodály – for clarinet and piano
Leó Weiner: Peregi verbunk – for clarinet and piano
Béla Bartók: Three Folk Songs from Csík County – transcription for clarinet and piano
Béla Bartók: Rhapsody No. 1 for cello and piano
Zoltán Kodály: Sonata for cello and piano

Performed by:
Dániel Ali Lugosi – clarinet
Veronika Király-Lugosi – violin
István Varga – cello
Gábor Eckhardt – piano
Apolka Bonnyai – piano

The beautifully renovated building of the Subotica synagogue is the venue for a colourful programme of Hungarian music.  The first half is dedicated to Romanticism. The upbeat is given by Liszt’s Festive Polonaise, composed in Weimar for a princely wedding. The Keszthely-born composer and violinist Károly Goldmark, who worked mainly in Vienna, is known predominantly for his opera The Queen of Sheba, and less so for his chamber music. Here we shall hear his five-movement Suite No. 1 for violin and piano, written in the 1860s, which as a mark of respect to Goldmark, Liszt played in Pest with a great violinist of the time, Nándor Plotényi.
In the second half of the concert we hear works by defining masters of twentieth-century Hungarian music, Bartók and Kodály, and also works by Leó Weiner: some are original works, others transcriptions. Famous for his influence as a teacher of chamber music, Weiner’s Peregi verbunk published in 1951 gives a fine display of the czardas and verbunkos styles of earlier centuries. Bartók’s piece Evening in the Village is popular as a movement in his cycle Ten Easy Piano Pieces and a part of his orchestral cycle Hungarian Sketches. The basis of the piece is not folk music, but his own ideas. We shall hear it in a transcription for clarinet and piano, as we shall hear the Three Folk Songs from Csík County composed in 1907 for piano, which as the title suggests, are arrangements of genuine folk songs. The Rhapsody No. 1 for cello and piano follows tradition in consisting of a slow and a fast (‘fresh’) part.  At the world premiere in 1929 the cello was played by Jenő Kerpely and the piano by Béla Bartók himself, just as in the case of Zoltán Kodály’s Sonata for cello and piano, when it was first performed in Budapest in 1910. The cello played an important role in Kodály’s chamber music. As he said himself, since there was no cello teacher in Nagyszombat, he taught himself to play. The fourth opus by the young composer, it consists of a slow Fantasy for the first movement, and a large-scale, dance-like cheery, spirited Allegro con spirito for the second. At the end Kodály recalls the slow tempo of the first movement, thus providing a frame for the work. The entire opus is permeated with the ‘atmosphere’ of folk music, but there are no quotations from folk pieces. Also linked to Kodály, and to Hungarian folk music, is the Hommage by the outstanding clarinettist Béla Kovács. professor emeritus at the Academy of Music.

 Performers

Apolka Bonnyai started playing the piano at the age of 10 with teacher Ella Miklósné, then continued her studies at the Béla Bartók Conservatory in the class of Katalin Schweitzer and Gábor Eckhardt. She graduated as a pianist in 2001 from the Liszt Academy of Music under the tutelage of Balázs Szokolay, András Kemenes and Dénes Várjon, and received her DLA degree in 2013.

She has won numerous scholarships and international music competitions. As a winner of the Grand Prize Virtuoso and the Golden Classical Music Awards international music competitions, she has performed at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and Carnegie Hall in New York. Winner of the Weingarten Fellowship, she studied at the Birmingham Conservatoire with Professor Malcolm Bilson, and then at Montclair University in the United States under David Witten and Mark Pakman, with the Terplan Research Fellowship.

She performed with great success at the 9th Kyoto International Music Festival in Japan, which was recorded on CD. Other festival invitations include the Yamaha Artist Liszt Festival and the Hungarian Arts and Humanities Festival in New York, as well as the Cziffra Piano Festival. She has participated twice in the V4 Piano Festival in Sárospatak, where she was also artistic director in 2019.
She has performed as a soloist in prestigious venues such as the Palace of Arts, Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Wiener Konzerthaus, the Mozarteum, the Alti Hall and many other concert halls in Europe and America. She regularly makes recordings in the Márványterem of the Hungarian Radio.

Since 2001, Apolka Bonnyai has been a piano teacher at the Szent István Király Music Secondary School.
She is the founder and artistic director of the Carpathian Basin Classical Music Festival.

Gábor Eckhardt began his musical studies at the Zoltán Kodály Primary School for Singing and Music. In 1975, after graduating from the Béla Bartók Secondary School of Music, he was admitted to the second year of the piano course at the Liszt Academy of Music. His teachers were Sándor Falvai and György Kurtág. He attended a two-year post-graduate course at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, studying with Dmitri Bashkirov. In 1980, he was awarded first prize in the Dohnányi Piano Competition at the college.

He is an active performer both at home and abroad. In 1996 he was awarded the Liszt Prize. As a dedicated interpreter of Hungarian contemporary music, he has been awarded the Artisjus Prize several times and the Oeuvre Prize in 2012. He was a founding member of the Intermodulation Chamber Ensemble led by László Tihanyi. He formed the Trio d’Echo with András Horn (clarinet) and György Déri (cello). From 2003–2009 he was a member of the Budapest Festival Orchestra.

He teaches piano at the Liszt Academy of Music. His pupils have successfully performed in national and international piano competitions, many of them becoming renowned artists. He regularly gives master classes and further training courses, not only in Hungary but also in Europe and Asia. He has participated as a jury member or jury president in numerous competitions in Hungary and abroad (Austria, Germany, Slovakia, Serbia, Japan, China, Vietnam, etc.). He was the editor of the second volume of the score of György Cziffra’s ‘Transcriptions’. He is a popular presenter with both children and adults.

Born on 14 February 1999 in Ózd, Daniel Ali Lugosi started to play the clarinet at the age of 10, and his musical development was assisted by Sándor Horváth, a teacher at the Aladár Rácz Music School in the XVIth district, and by András Horn, Csaba Klenyán and János Szepesi.
As a student at the King Saint Stephen Music High School in Budapest, he participated in the 1st Tibor Dittrich National Chamber Music Festival in 2012, where he was awarded the first prize in the ‘Individual Clarinet Competition’. In 2012, he was awarded first prize at the Fifth Anton Eberst International Clarinet Competition in Novi Sad. In 2013, he was again awarded first prize at the Twelfth National Clarinet Competition for Music Schools.

In 2013, he was admitted to the class for exceptional talents at the Vienna Academy of Music with Professor Johann Hindler.

In 2014, he was awarded third place at the 15th Osaka International Music Competition, and in 2016, in addition to winning his age group, he was awarded the Grand Prix and 5 special prizes.
In the autumn of 2014, in the final of the classical music competition Virtuózok, broadcast by Hungarian Television (MTVA), the jury awarded him first prize in his age group and he also won the Virtuózok Grand Prix, based on the public vote. In 2017, he was awarded the Sándor Benkó Prize.
He has given concerts in Vienna, Austria; Milan, Italy; Miami (Kravis Center, Adrienne Arsht Center), West Palm Beach, New York (Lincoln Center), USA; London (Royal Albert Hall), UK; Toronto, Ottawa (Oscar Peterson Hall), Montreal, Canada; Osaka, Kyoto, Japan; Dublin, Ireland.
Dániel Ali Lugosi plays Buffet Crampon instruments provided by FonTrade.

Veronika Király-Lugosi was admitted to the Exceptional Talents Department of the Liszt Academy of Music at the age of 10. She graduated as a violinist in 2003 as a student of Professor Dénes Kovács.

In 2000 she was accepted to the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and in 2001 she was awarded the Hungarian Republic Scholarship. In the same year, she was invited by the Liszt Academy of Music to represent Hungary at the 9th Kyoto International Music Festival, where her performance was recorded on CD.

She was able to develop her skill under the direction of such famous artists as Isaac Stern, György Pauk, Dora Schwarzberg, Igor Ozim, and Michael Frischenschlager. In 2010, she was invited by the Lausanne Music Academy to participate in the master class of Pierre Amoyale, a student of Jasha Heifetz.

She has won many international competitions, and as a young soloist, she has been invited to Belgium, Germany, Canada, Japan, London, and Switzerland. She is a regular performer in the series ‘Soloists of the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra’ in the Marble Hall of the Hungarian Radio. Most recently, she gave a recital in Rome, and as a winner of the Grand Prize Virtuoso and the Golden Classical Music Awards international music competitions, she has performed at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and Carnegie Hall in New York.

Born in Subotica, István Varga studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, and the Conservatoire in Paris. As a teacher he returned to his homeland, teaching in the Faculty of Music in Belgrade and the Department of Music in Novi Sad. He founded the Camerata Academica Chamber Orchestra and the Goldberg String Trio, which were soon among the best known ensembles in former Yugoslavia. As artistic director of the Novi Sad Musical Festival he has organized large-scale international chamber music festivals.

Important composers have written pieces for him, and he has won the Prize of the Yugoslav Composers’ Association. He has given concerts in the most renowned concert halls in the world, such as the Wigmore Hall in London, the Salle Gaveau in Paris, the Rachmaninov Hall in Moscow, and the Solti Hall in the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest.

He regularly holds masterclasses in Hungary, Croatia, and France. He settled in Hungary in 1999, and is currently a cello teacher at the Liszt Academy. His longstanding chamber music partner is pianist Gábor Csalog, and they regularly play in concerts together in Hungary and abroad.