Artist database

Zsolt Serei was born in 1954, April 3 in Takácsi, in Western Hungary. He began studying music, first the piano, then the trombone at Pápa. He attended the Vocational School of Music in Győr and in Budapest, where he studied composition under István Fekete Győr and the trombone under György Zilcz and József Nagy. He became a student of the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music in 1973, where he obtained a degree in composition as a student of Endre Szervánszky and Emil Petrovics, then from 1979 he went on to study conducting under the tutelage of András Kórodi and Ervin Lukács and took a degree in 1982. During this time he also studied under Zoltán Jeney and Albert Simon as a private pupil. He has been a member of the New Music Studio since 1978, participating in the concerts both as a performer and conductor as well as composing pieces for the group. He has been teaching at the faculty of composition of the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music since 1986, where his subjects are vocal and instrumental counterpoint, classical stylistic practice, orchestration and conducting practice. In 1989 he founded the instrumental group Componensemble, which has become one of the most significant bases of contemporary music-making in Hungary. It is to the Componensemble that we owe the Budapest premieres of Pierre Boulez’s Eclat / Multiples, György Kurtág’s What is the Word, Morton Feldman’s For Samuel Beckett, Routine Investigation, For Frank O’Hara, among others. The group primarily plays Hungarian contemporary music, though their repertoire includes 20th century classics and the chamber works of Berio, Boulez, Xenakis and others. At the head of Componensemble, Zsolt Serei has made several CD-, radio- and TV-recordings of works by Gyula Csapó, János Decsényi, Barnabás Dukay, Zoltán Jeney, György Kurtág, József Sári, László Sáry, József Soproni, András Szőllősy, László Tihanyi, László Vidovszky and others. He has given many guest performances and attended several festivals abroad with the group (the Zagreb Biennial, the Warsaw Autumn Festival, the Melos Festival etc.). In 1991 he conducted Pierre Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître, and Dérive at the head of the Dutch Nieuw Ensemble. Serei’s Rege was performed in 1982 in Brussels, and Calyx in 1986 in Budapest as part of the ISCM Festival. Componensemble and Zsolt Serei have won the Hungarian Artisjus award several times for their excellent rendering of Hungarian new music. In 1999 Zsolt Serei won the Music Award of the Soros Foundation. In the same year his chamber opera, based on István Örkény’s One Minute Stories and written on command of the Budapest Chamber Opera, was performed at the Bárka Theatre as part of the program of the Budapest Autumn Festival.

see also: Serei Zsolt - composer