The History of Liszt Academy in Four Minute - short film of the 22.10.2013 Grand Opening Gala Concert
Creative Producer: Imre SZABÓ STEIN, Director of Communications and Media Concent Development, Liszt Academy
Director: Dávid GÉCZY
Cameraman: Gábor TOKODI
Archive footage: courtesy of MTVA
The only Music Academy in the world founded by Ferenc Liszt
"Génie oblige!" was his credo: the duty of an artist is to use his gifts for the benefit of humanity and to nurture genuine talent. Teaching at the Liszt Academy is rooted in this principle, reflecting the vision of its open and versatile internationally recognised founder, who was years ahead of his time. A straight line can be traced through four generations from Liszt to the Academy's piano professors of today.
The Academy has always taken pride in meeting the standards set by its founders and revered professors. This means students encounter a special and demanding Hungarian style of teaching. Education here focuses on understanding the meaning of music and the art of ensemble playing.
Those who enter the Liszt Academy know that attendance involves a serious commitment to a perfectionist approach to music. Studying here means hard and disciplined work under the guidance of professors who are renowned artists, visiting professors at other illustrious universities, jury members of international competitions, for whom teaching is a passion.
The Academy's choir and symphony orchestra maintain rigorous standards, and are conducted by widely renowned guest conductors such as Zoltán Kocsis, Helmut Rilling, Peter Schreier.
Invited by the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Catalan viola da gamba artist Jordi Savall held a master class in the Solti Hall on the morning of 18 May, while in the evening he performed Bach’s perhaps most complex late masterpiece Musikalisches Opfer (The Musical Offering) with Le Concert des Nations before a full house at the Grand Hall.
The American soprano singer, Nicole Taylor held a master class entitled African-American Spirituals to the jazz voice students of the Liszt Academy and the Bartók Béla Secondary Music School.
Students of the Department of Vocal Studies headed by Andrea Meláth, together with young composers, recreated Mozart's musical stage world under the guidance of professor of direction and programme director András Almási-Tóth, staging – on two occasions – the "never-seen-before" (and more accurately, not existing before this) fictive Mozart opera made up of concert arias and entitled The Don Juan Project.
In 2014 four composition students – Bálint Horváth, Balázs D. Kecskés, Bence Kutric and András Gábor Virágh – have each written 15–20 minute mini-operas expressly for the students of the opera faculty and based on a jointly-created libretto.
The half-term opera exam at the Liszt Academy weaved three operas by Rossini – La Scala di Seta (The Silk Ladder), L’Italiana in Algeri (An Italian Woman in Algiers) and Il Viaggio a Reims (The Journey to Reims) – into a single-series episode where misunderstandings in love lead to the great reconciliation, just so that the strands can once be tangled up in time for the next part.
Head of the Liszt Academy opera programme, András Almási-Tóth, has selected a rarely performed Károly Goldmark work on a Shakespeare drama, A Winter’s Tale (1908), and Ferenc Lehár’s popular operetta about the love affair between a Viennese aristocratic girl and a Chinese prince, The Land of Smiles (1929), as examination pieces.
Students - On the Spot
In Series On the Spot students have the opportunity to step on the stage of the Solti Hall and Grand Hall
“May the artist of the future set his goal within, and not without, himself; may virtuosity be a means and not an end for him; and may he never forget that though the saying is Noblesse oblige, still more than nobility–Génie oblige!” Thus wrote Ferenc Liszt about Paganini in 1840, and he himself was an example to posterity of what talent demands of an artist – sharing talent with the world above all else. The series “Talent Oblige” of the Liszt Academy Concert Centre provides the opportunity for several students or ensembles of the Liszt Academy to share their talent every half year.
Liszt Kidz Academy
Youth Programs at the Liszt Academy
Every child is born with music in them. There is not a single infant who would not be stirred by the music of Mozart or Bach. Or maybe Gangnam Style, depending on what they hear at home. Naturally, the youth programmes of the Liszt Academy are not intended to acquaint kids with the values of pop culture, but instead with the three worlds of music that define the academy's teaching and concert life: classical music, folk music and jazz. The purpose of the music academy's youth programmes, operating under the code name Liszt Kidz Academy, is not to raise musicians but rather to create the audience of the future.
With the cooperation Liszt Academy and LEGO Hungary Budapest's landmark concert palace and university, Liszt Academy was recreated using 20000 bricks. The plastic palace finished in 120 hours was not built to become a showpiece, children play with it during the Liszt Kidz Academy.
There are weekly activities for small groups of 5–10-year-olds. Not only are these children taught about the different music genres and forms and shown – and allowed to handle – various instruments, but they are also initiated into the operational mechanism of concert organization.
Children also learn about the sort of problems that arise in an orchestral rehearsal, what the baton is used for, how an orchestra becomes a single instrument, why a conductor must have an insight into psychology, and why a symphony orchestra cannot be operated along purely democratic lines. And at the end of the day the conclusion, naturally, is that the conductor is far from superfluous in classical music.
Editor in chief: Imre Szabó Stein
Managing Editor: Zsuzsanna Könyves-Tóth
Also Collaborated: Linda Buczkó, Dorina Gyurkócza, Péter Lorenz, Dániel Végh
