The viola player Máté Szűcs was born in 1978 in Debrecen. In 1988 he won the Special Prize of the Hungarian Violin Competition for Young Artists, and in 1994 he was awarded First Prize at the Szeged Violin Competition and First Prize for the Best Sonata Duo in the Hungarian Chamber Music Competition. At the age of seventeen he changed from violin to viola and graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Brussels and the Royal Conservatory of Flanders with the highest distinction. At the age of twenty he was awarded First Prize for viola at the international violin and viola competition in Liege, Belgium, and was a finalist in the Jean Françaix International Viola Competition in Paris and a laureate of the Tenuto International Music Competition in Brussels. From 1998 to 2001 he studied at the Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth where he graduated with the highest distinction. Since 2003 he has served as principal viola player in various prestigious orchestras. Between 2007 and 2009 he taught at the University of Music in Saarbrücken and since 2012 has been viola tutor at the Britten-Pears Festival in Aldeburgh, England. He makes regular appearances as a soloist and in chamber ensembles. Since September 2011 he has served as first solo viola player in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, where he is also a teacher at the orchestral academy.

The Budapest Symphony Orchestra MÁV is one of the leading orchestras in Hungary. It was founded in 1945 after the Second World War by the president of the Hungarian State Railway (MÁV). The orchestra’s repertoire ranges from Baroque to contemporary works, with an audience of over 50,000 people annually, reaching out to many more through radio and television broadcasts and online platforms.

Successful tours have gained the orchestra acclaim across Europe and South America, as well as in China, Egypt, Hong Kong, Japan, Lebanon, Oman and South Korea. During its more than seven decades of activity, it has worked with numerous world stars including Kiri Te Kanawa, Helen Donath, Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, Andrea Bocelli, Roberto Alagna, Ruggiero Ricci, Elisabeth Leonskaja and Lazar Berman, among many others. Numerous internationally celebrated conductors have conducted the orchestra, including Kurt Masur, János Ferencsik, Zoltán Kodály, Miklós Rózsa, Lamberto Gardelli, Franco Ferrara, Roberto Benzi, Angelo Ephrikian, Arvid Jansons, Herbert Blomstedt, James Levine, Jesús López Cobos, Charles Dutoit, Leonard Slatkin, Muhai Tang, Thomas Sanderling and Gábor Takács-Nagy.

www.mavzenekar.hu

Photo: Mate Steirer

The Hungarian conductor Valéria Csányi (b. 1958, Budapest) studied at the Liszt Academy of Music, obtaining a music teacher’s and choral conductor’s diploma in 1982 and a conductor’s diploma in 1984. She has attended masterclasses given by Karl Österreicher in Vienna, Péter Eötvös in Szombathely and Milan Horvat in Salzburg, and since 1983, has been a member of the Hungarian State Opera, initially as a répétiteur.

She was given the opportunity to conduct opera in 1988, leading several works, including premieres, and between 1995 and 2009 she took part in all of the ballet productions of the State Opera. She has worked extensively at the Hungarian State Opera, conducting more than 700 performances. She has toured Austria, Germany, Poland, Spain, Sweden and Mexico.

Csányi has made recordings for Naxos including the operetta Fürstin Ninetta by Johann Strauss II with the Stockholm Strauss-Orkester [8.660227-28] as well as the first complete recording of Ferenc Erkel’s opera István király (‘King Stephen’) [8.660345-46], Leó Weiner’s ballet Csongor and Tünde [8.573491] and Imre Széchényi’s Complete Dances for Orchestra [8.573807].

Leo Weiner was born on April 16th, 1885 in Budapest. His parents did not give him a musical education. He began his musical studies on his own initiative and learned to compose by analysing the works of the great composers. At the age of 16 he applied for admission to the Liszt Academy in Budapest, where he was a pupil of János Koessler (1853–1926), a representative of the Brahms tradition, and who was the teacher of Bartók, Kodály, Dohnányi, Emerich Kálmán and Victor Jacobi, among others. Weiner himself taught there from 1907 until his death. In his chamber music faculty he taught generations of musicians for half a century. Almost all the world-famous Hungarian musicians of this period were his pupils. Weiner was not only the living embodiment of a tradition, but he consolidated his pedagogical activity with his writings (text books on music theory, musical analyses).

Weiner’s career as a composer began like a comet. In his fifth year of study he won all the awards possible at the Liszt Academy. In 1908 he was awarded the Franz Joseph prize for his compositions, and this covered his study tour around Europe, to Vienna, Munich, Berlin and Paris.

His earliest works were already characterised by his knowledge of classical culture, an imaginative use of colour and bravura instrumentation, combined with lyrical emotion. Weiner managed to synthesise in an original way the tradition of Schumann and Mendelssohn together with the language of European and Hungarian music of the period. He composed true Hungarian music, without using folk melodies. He immediately made a stir with his new, captivating sound. The works written by the composer in his twenties were welcomed on the prestigious concert podiums of the world and were published by famous European publishing houses.

The pressure of the new modern, diverse musical developments that were so distant from Weiner’s personality, threw him into such a creative crisis that he even relinquished his position as a professor of composition at the Liszt Academy. The inspiration of folk music showed him a way out of the crisis. He made use of folk music in a somewhat different way from Kodály and Bartók. As the writer of a monograph on the composer, Melinda Berlász, says, “For Weiner, folk music represented a solely musical consideration. It was a precious musical material, rich in individual characteristics, which, as he confessed, he could stylize ’with refined artistic self-restraint’ in his works and make ’classical’.” These works also met with international success. The inferno of World War II caused him another creative crisis that lasted for seven years. After the war he polished and orchestrated his earlier pieces, wrote both works for pedagogical purposes and others that were a summation of his compositional output. He was awarded the highest Hungarian state award, the Kossuth Prize, twice in this period. He died on September 13th, 1960.