Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra
Orchestras
Since the autumn of 1997 Zoltán Kocsis has been chief musical director of the Orchestra. Attesting to the significance, mission and performance of the Orchestra, in the Ministry of National Cultural Heritage declared it, together with the National Choir, an outstanding national institution.
In recent years the Orchestra has received numerous invitations abroad. Since 1997 it has given some 100 concerts in 40 countries, from Avery Fisher Hall in New York, Suntory Hall in Tokyo to the Birmingham Symphony Hall, the Megaron Musicos in Athens and the Canary Island Festival. The critics of the prestigious online musical review ConcertoNet presented the Orchestra the Lully Award for the best concert of the season for its New York concert in February 2003. In 2011 they appeared in Brussels at the Bozar Centre and in the Vatican, performing to Pope Benedict XVI. In February the Orchestra went on a long tour of Germany. They were guests of honour at the Cracow Mahler Festival. In the summer they appeared in Potsdam, in the autumn in Romania and France, together with Vadim Repin and Boris Berezovsky.
The season ticket concerts of the Orchestra are highly successful, and every year they perform successfully with internationally acclaimed soloists or conductors including Ingrid Fliter, Michail Jurowski, Leonid Kuzmin, Alexei Volodin, Michail Agrest, Howard Williams, Gilbert Varga, Segei Nakarjakov, Jörg Widman, Wolfgang Schöne, Andrea Rost, Gidon Kremer, Sergei Krylov, Vadim Repin, Natalia Gutman, Gábor Boldoczki and Kristóf Baráti.
In the spring of 2003 they produced a CD containing Zoltán Kocsis’s orchestrations of works by Debussy and Ravel, which was the first recording of the renewed National Symphony Orchestra and which instantly won the “Best Hungarian Classical Album of the Year” Award, founded by the critics of the Hungarian musical review Gramofon. Published in February 2004, their second album featured three works by Bartók – Concerto, the Dance Suite and Hungarian Peasant Songs. The recording received numerous awards at home and abroad, including the MIDEM in Cannes, presented to the best classical orchestral recording of the year.
Zoltán Kocsis was artistic director of Bartók New Series project, a new edition of the complete works of Bartók, launched in December 2006 and published by the Hungaroton Classic label. The recordings have received wide critical acclaim in Hungary and internationally. The second instalment in the Bartók New Series (Kossuth Symphony, The Wooden Prince) won another MIDEM Classic Award. The other albums in the series have been unequivocally successful. Outstandingly, 23 critics of the BBC Music Magazine voted No. 10 in the Bartók New Series (Music for Strings, Percussion and Cenesta, Divertimento, Hungarian Sketches) as "Record of the Month”. Most recently, No. 9 in the Bartók New Series (Violin Concerto, Violin Rhapsodies) received the German Critics Award in 2011. This album was also a nominee for the International Music Award.
SEASON 2011/2012
