In autumn 2017 I collaborated with Isola Quassud, a theatre company based in Catania, Sicily, developing music within an intercultural production entitled ‘Welcome to Italy’. The aim was to immerse the audience in Italy’s disfunctional reception process for immigrants. Through a series of workshops involving reading, movement and singing, the actors drew Read more…
To complement the story of Ted Gorton’s book Renaissance Emir, I put together a programme to the Mosaic Rooms, London. I was joined by Stavroula Constanti, Ahmad AlSalhi, Nilufar Habibian and Interlink publisher Michel Moushabeck. Literature Event & Concert: Renaissance Emir
In 2004 the English press—specifically newspapers that are usually rather critical, The Guardian and The Observer—covered some western classical music initiatives in Ramallah led by the celebrated conductor Daniel Barenboim. They were wildly admiring, while also reproducing imperialistic discourses about Arabs and Europe (the former in need of the latter’s civilizing missions). I Read more…
Ligeti was at the heart of progressive movements in classical composition in Europe from the 1960s onwards, but in this book I examined his work through the frame of his earlier Hungarian influences. I dug out numerous sources from communist-era archives, demonstrating the machinery of artistic censorship and Ligeti’s enmeshed Read more…
My first book was commissioned for Ashgates ‘Landmarks in Music Since 1950’ series. It focuses on a piece of music composed in 1960s Hungary, still today uncompromisingly tough to listen to, even while it was rejected as ‘too 19th-century’ when it was premiered, in 1968, at the hothouse of progressive Read more…
In January 1996 I was selected to play at London’s Purcell Room in the Park Lane Group concert series for young artists. I combined short pieces by György Kurtág, with whom I had studied, with a newly-commissioned work by the Hungarian László Tihanyi, in whose Ensemble Intermodulation I had performed. The largest-scale Read more…
In January 1995 I put together a piano recital for Bartok Radio, with a programme that was highly unusual for Hungary. I started and finnished with 3 pieces from Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jésus, played the Piano Sonata by Aaron Copland in the middle and – for a local Read more…