An English-language international conference linked to this year’s Bartók World Competition has again been held by the Institute for Musicology of the Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Held on September 14, the symposium focused on Bartók and the piano and the first volume of a Bartók complete critical edition published by the Institute this year.

The jury for this year’s Bartók World Competition is headed by Kenji Watanabe, one of Japan’s best-known pianists, who is also noted for his authentic interpretations of Liszt and Bartók. Currently a lecturer at the Tokyo University of the Arts, he studied at the Liszt Academy in the 1980s, where he learned to speak Hungarian, and he believes that his command of the language has helped him a great deal to uncover the inner logic of Bartók’s musical world.

On Saturday, Ádám Balogh, Peter Klimo and Ádám Szokolay are to compete in the orchestral finals of the Bartók World Competition organized by the Academy of Music. The three pianists will each play a piece of their own choice accompanied by the Hungarian National Philharmonic conducted by Zsolt Hamar.

The Wednesday semi-finals have produced a list of competitors to play in the Bartók World Competition solo finals: three Hungarians, a Hungarian-American, a Ukrainian and a Spanish pianist have cleared the bar.

The jury decided on Tuesday evening that 14 competitors, that is, two more than had originally been planned, would go on to the Bartók World Competition semi-finals. The two-day preliminaries produced a list of semi-finalists, including five Hungarian, one Hungarian-American, one Ukrainian, one Bulgarian, one Spanish, one Czech, one South Korean, one Chinese-American and two Chinese contestants.

An open-air festival held in Liszt Ferenc Square on Sunday ushered in this year’s third World Bartók Competition. The order in which competitors will appear in the preliminaries was decided on the opening day of the series of events organized by the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music.

On 8 September, a free open-air festival will usher in the Bartók World Competition, organized by the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music for pianists this time. 

Some musical characteristics of his compositions, especially in his works for piano, are inseparable from his pianist personality. They are also defined by the fact that he always intended his works, even those containing his most abstract ideas, for actual performance.

Dániel Dobos has had some fruitful months lately, winning both the Junior Classical Musician of the Year Award and the first prize of the 2018 Bartók World Competition. The young and modest composer knows 'those beneficent limits' precisely within which he can freely release his imagination and create the right piece of music.

Violinist Gábor Takács-Nagy has been conducting since 2001, and by now it has become his main activity. He was appointed music director of the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra in 2007 and of the Manchester Camerata since 2007. He was the principal violin (1975 to 1992) of the Takács Quartet, still named after him. During his career He has performed with legendary musicians such as Gidon Kremer, Sir Yehudi Menuhin, Jean-Pierre Rampal, György Solti, Isaac Stern or Mstislav Rostropovitch. The Liszt Prize winner musician tells our magazine about fantasy and the stories told by sounds.