On 29 October, the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music is welcoming its visitors with concerts and guided building tours within the framework of the event series of the Open Day of EU Developments.

This is to inform our audience that the Main Building of the Liszt Academy (Liszt Ferenc Square) will be open between 23 October and 1 November.

“Strings in the earth and air / Make music sweet; / Strings by the river where / The willows meet.” One could imagine a Monteverdi madrigal melody accompanying this verse from the Chamber Music cycle by James Joyce. The poem’s delicate flute and lute parts evoke in my mind the open-eyed wonder of infants on discovering something new: the world is still full of gods; branches and clouds live; a caress has a taste; sight has a sound: sensation is still whole and free, not broken into fragmentary experiences.

The programme and participants of the concert of 26 October have changed.

On 13 October, the Kodály Institute of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music entered into a cooperation agreement with the Reformed Elementary School of Kecskemét: as of the autumn of 2016, also Kodály’s home town will launch a model class applying the world-renowned music pedagogy combined with 21st century methods.

The king of tango, Astor Piazzolla and his work are in the centre of the concerts and masterclasses of the Budapest International Guitar Festival taking place between 4-6 November, 2016.

These days we are lucky to have an abundance of incredible countertenors, but Michael Chance is totally unique in the English Baroque vocal repertoire. On 21 October he will sing in Liszt Academy’s Solti Hall an exclusive song programme with works by Dowland, Byrd and Schubert, and accompanied by Maggie Cole.

The greatness of Steve Reich is a given. In the 1960s and ‘70s, he found a rigorous solution to a pressing challenge: how to restore, after a long period of experimentation, the primal pleasures of stable harmony and a steady pulse. Reich did this in a way that was unblinkingly modern and not at all nostalgic or neo-Romantic. Reich’s influence is vast, reaching far outside classical music. On some days, as familiar shimmering patterns echo on the sound- tracks of commercials and from the loudspeakers of dance clubs, it seems as though we are living in a world scored by Reich.

The ensembles of the Béla Bartók Conservatory of Music (Bartók ‘Konzi’) give three concerts at the Liszt Academy in the 2016–17 concert season. Szabolcs Benkő, director of the conservatory, spoke to the Concert Magazine about the close relationship between the two institutions and about future plans.

Within the framework of an international strategic cooperation programme, with the Liszt Academy as the lead organisation, partner institutions from Budapest, the Netherlands and Scotland will collaborate to carry out methodological improvements in music education based on the principles of the Kodály method.