Composer Sándor Szokolay passed away on 8 December 2013 at the age of 83. Members of his family, students and admirers bid their final farewell in the Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Cemetery in the town of Sopron on 21 December.

Sándor Szokolay was born in Kunágota (in the southeast of Hungary) on 30 March, 1931. He studied composition with Ferenc Szabó and Ferenc Farkas at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music between 1950 and 1957. While still studying, he taught solfege in the framework of the Budapest Music School Organization. From 1955 to 1961 he was member of the editorial staff of the Hungarian Radio, then he was working as a freelance composer for some years. From 1966 to his retirement in 1994 he was professor of composition, counterpoint, and prosody at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music. He also took the position of music reader of the Hungarian Television between 1977 and 1988. He has actively participated in the activity of severalorganizations, among them the Hungarian Kodály Society, the Hungarian Music Chamber, the Hungarian National Foundation and the Hungarian Radio Foundation.

The chairman of the Royal Philharmonic Society, John Gilhooly, described the concert given by György and Márta Kurtág in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on 1 December as a significant event in music history. In the first half of the recital Hiromi Kikuchi performed the eight-movement Hipartita for solo violin, which the composer had dedicated to the musician. After the interval, György and Márta Kurtág played a selection of solo and four-handed pieces from Games and Kurtág’s Bach transcriptions. Compositions which had originally been written as a homage, gift or message in sounds to colleagues and friends featured significantly in the ‘composed ’ programme that was performed without intermission. The Kurtágs played on an upright piano with the ‘quiet’ pedal always depressed. The instrument’s sound was amplified only to the extent that in the jam-packed hall accommodating 900 people everyone would feel the intensity of the soft sounds and could enter the magic world revealed by the playing of the two exceptional musicians. Their performance and the encore, a four-handed Schumann piece, received a standing ovation.

This year the 23rd Ny Musik Festival in Boras is saluting the 70-year-old Zoltán Jeney with two concerts.

On 7 November the composer will play his piano pieces (Endgame; Movements of the Eye; maunderin tongue in a pounderin jowl), while on 10 November Something Round and Something Like composed for 25 strings, Something Lost (for prepared piano) and Something Found (piano, harmonium and chamber ensemble) from the series Something inspired by e. e. cummings’ poems will be presented. Both concerts are being held in the town’s 13th-century Caroli church.

The concert hall of the Berliner Philharmonic, designed by Hans Scharoun and noted for its unique architecture, opened 50 years ago. On 20 October the anniversary is being celebrated by a gala concert with a programme that features compositions filling musical space in a special way.

The programme of the Budapest Music of Our Age Festival, being held for the 39th time this year, focuses on anniversaries of Polish and Hungarian composers. Besides works by Witold Lutosławski, born a century ago, and György Ligeti born 90 years ago, compositions by Krzysztof Penderecki and Henryk Górecki, who are celebrating their 80th birthdays this year, the 80-year-old Miklós Kocsár and István Láng, as well as the 70-year-old László Dubrovay and Zoltán Jeney, are being presented either for the first time in Hungary or in the world.

Gyula Dávid, one of the most important representatives of the generation following Bartók and Kodály, was born on the 6th of May 1913. His versatile oeuvre – a significant part of it published by Editio Musica Budapest - was a great success after the 2nd World War. His Viola Concerto is still often played. The centenary of his birth gives us the opportunity to rediscover his music that got less attention in the past 36 years since his death. His works will be played on the 2nd of May at the Old Academy of Music, the 5th of May at the FUGA Architectural Centre, on the 9th at Óbudai Társaskör. On the 4th of May, he will be remembered through an exhibition at the Community Centre of Visegrád.

The Hungarian Academy of Sciences Research Centre for the Humanities Institute for Musicology is organizing a conference on March 14th, 2013, to mark Zoltán Jeney’s 70th birthday. From 10 a.m. lectures will be given by Sándor Kovács, Szabolcs Molnár, Anna Dalos, Tünde Szitha, Balázs Déri and Zoltán Farkas on the composer’s works and the history of the New Music Studio. From 2.30 p.m. the conference will close with a concert featuring a selection of Zoltán Jeney’s chamber music works.

Kim Kashkashian won the Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo with her Kurtág/Ligeti album titled Music for Viola. The american-armenian viola master has devoted herself principally to the Hungarian composer György Kurtág's works for the last twenty years. As Joshua Kosman wrote: „It's a terrific pairing of two linked but complementary sensibilities, matching Kurtág's terse, aphoristic style with Ligeti's more expansive and playful creative personality."

This year the Finnish Wihuri Foundation has awarded to György Kurtág the prize for composition established in 1953 and first awarded to Jean Sibelius, after whom it was later named. The prestige of this distinction is demonstrated by the list of the recipients over the last six decades:  Jean Sibelius; Paul Hindemith; Dmitrij Shostakovich; Igor Stravinsky; Benjamin Britten; Erik Bergman, Usko Meriläinen and Einojuhani Rautavaara; Olivier Messiaen; Witold Lutoslawski; Joonas Kokkonen; Krzysztof Penderecki; Aulis Sallinen; Ligeti György; Magnus Lindberg; Per Nørgård; Kaija Saariaho. The foundation’s prize for science was awarded this year to the internationally well-known Finnish researcher in bioeconomics, Merja Pentttilä.

A Chamber Opera Workshop is being organized for young composers by the Peter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation in 2013 to produce a jointly created opera on Sławomir Mrożek’s absurd one-act play entitled ‘Out at Sea’, which unites and addresses the predominant phenomena of the modern age (alienation, abuse of power, conformity and the question of the boundaries of freedom) in one grotesque situation, and in which the problem of part-whole relations is reflected in the possibilities of form and technique.