Tenth volume of Kurtág's piano series Games and Two Musorgsky Transcriptions for piano duet have been freshly published.

Since 2010, renowned Noh-singer, Ryoko Aoki, has organized Noh × Contemporary Music to commission international composers to write new pieces for Noh voice. In this year’s project, Máté Balogh’s composition, Matsuo Basho’s Song was among the commissioned works that were premiered on 14 May 2021 in Tokyo.

We are pleased to announce that our new website is now live. The site has been refreshed to support you even better in exploring our partners and products, and to adjust with the websites of other houses of UMP Classical.

This launch is only the start. The work will be continued to improve and develop our site so that you may always find what you are looking for.

In 2017, Máté Bella composed his work Hesperus for viola and ensemble. The work was commissioned by the Ensemble Intercontemporaine and premiered on 16 February 2019 on French Radio. On May 18, Péter Bársony will be the soloist of the Hungarian premiere at the Budapest Music Center, the UMZE ensemble will be conducted by Gregory Vajda. We asked the composer on the occasion of this coming performance.

What kind of compositional ideas have you realized in Hesperus?

This piece is the third one in a series: First, Chuang Tzu’s Dream was written for cello and ensemble, then came Trance for violin and ensemble, and finally, Hesperus for viola and ensemble joined them.

Recent months’ releases include selections of solo and chamber works by Ferenc Farkas and his former student, György Kurtág, published by UMP Editio Musica Budapest, performed by excellent musicians.

"The third master" - his faithful monographer, János Kárpáti used this epithet on András Szőllősy who was born on February 27, 1921, a hundred years ago. He was the third beside György Ligeti and György Kurtág, who were all born in Transylvania in the 1920s, and then graduated from the Budapest Academy of Music - that is, he was the third behind his world-famous colleagues and friends.

Szőllősy’s oeuvre is thin, consisting of barely thirty compositions, mostly from the 1970s and 1980s, followed by a few “autumn flowers” until 2002. The late start of the career is explained by the fact that although Szőllősy studied composition as a student of Zoltán Kodály, he felt more like a musicologist until the mid-1960s, collecting and editing the works and writings of his great predecessors, Béla Kodály and Bartók. (his Sz-numbers are still used to identify Bartók's works).

UMP Editio Musica Budapest is constantly striving to ensure that its partners have access to its products in a way and at a standard that meets the requirements of the 21st century. As part of this, the publisher will radically transform its website, catalogue and the range of its scores published in digitized form in 2020–2021.

As the first step in this process, from December 2020 on, UMP EMB scores will appear on nkoda.com, the world’s greatest digital library of sheet music. Here they can be studied, and - with the exception of works distributed as rental material - they can even be performed in public. By subscribing the nkoda app, you can now access the works of György Kurtág, Péter Eötvös, Zoltán Kodály and many other Hungarian composers, which you could only get to know from printed sheet music so far.

EMB publications are available here.

Bach’s The Art of Fugue has excited the general public and composers with its perfection and fragmentation for more than two hundred years. Now the Danubia Orchestra Óbuda has commissioned three Hungarian composers to express with their music what this masterpiece says to them today.

The 12 movements written by the three composers will be premiered in a kaleidoscopic arrangement, like a whole-evening collective composition, on November 20 at the Academy of Music, Budapest under the direction of Benjamin Bayl.

UPDATE: Due to the epidemic situation, the premiere has been postponed to 2021.

György Kurtág’s opera Samuel Beckett: Fin de partie comes to stage in Les Arts of Valencia on October 28. „The last masterpiece of the 20th century”, as Alex Ross labelled this masterpiece, had its premiere in La Scala in November 2018, and then the production came some months later to Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam. After in 2020 two further performances (in Budapest and in London on BBC Proms) had to be postponed due to the COVID pandemic, the Spanish premier is the third station of the tour of the original cast: Frode Olsen (Hamm) Leigh Melrose (Clov), Hilary Summers (Nell), Leonardo Cortellazzi (Nagg), the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana is directed by Markus Stenz, stage direction by Pierre Audi. Further performances are expected on June 10, 2021, with the New York Philharmonic and on June 24, 2021, in Theater Dortmund.