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.

Six skylights made of stained glass and compressed beads and set in the decorative ceiling of the grand hall of Budapest’s Liszt Academy play a spectacular role: they form the terminal elements of the longitudinal walls, which are divided into three segments by the doors on the ground floor and the windows upstairs.

'Liszt Academy is my favourite music hall in the world' – said Joshua Bell at the end of his concert on 25 February 2019. The honourable statement by the Grammy-Winning world-class violinist is perhaps not only due to the Grand Hall’s enchanting ambience, but to the contact he had within minutes with the audience. Joshua Bell allows us to have a peek into the spiritual resonance, the joint thinking, which require a unique approach from the musician, the audience and the composer.

Fantasy, education, taste, music - these were the topics discussed with two outstanding Hungarian musicians. Guitar and hurdy-gurdy player and folklorist Ferenc Sebő and jazz saxophonist and composer Kristóf Bacsó are both members of different generations, moving in various music scenes, yet both deep-thinkers, whose opinion often point in the same direction.