A lecturer and a student of the Liszt Academy won at this year's New Hungarian Music Forum

The results of the sixth New Hungarian Music Forum (UMZF), organized by the Budapest Music Center (BMC) and Müpa, were announced this weekend at the CAFe Budapest Contemporary Art Festival. In the competition with a total prize of almost four million HUF, Balázs Horváth, associate professor at the Music Theory Department of the Liszt Academy, won first prize in the category of chamber works, with his composition titled quasi ciaccona metrica. Second place went to the work Silver by Ármin Cservenák, a student at the University of Music in Graz, and the third place went to former student and lecturer at the Liszt Academy and currently doctoral candidate Marcell Dargay for his composition RICERCAR – Hommage à Béla Bartók.

Dániel Láposi (Photo/Source: BMC)

Among the orchestra prieces, Dániel Láposi, MA 2nd year percussions student of the Liszt Academy, won first prize for his work Metamorphommage, and Balázs Horváth came second in this category with his composition 6th and 8th movement. The third prize was awarded to Dániel Dobri, who is a Liszt Academy graduate, and mainly known as a theatrical composer and jazz musician, for PentaTones for Orchestra.

The special prize of the Péter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation was awarded to Ármin Cservenák. Also, as a special prize, Universal Music Publishing – Editio Musica Budapest will publish and promote in an international campaign the chamber orchestra works by Dániel Dinyés and Balázs Horváth. The special prize of the Transparent Sound New Music Festival was also awarded to Ármin Cservenák, who won the opportunity to have his composition performed in 2022.

Balázs Horváth (Photo/Source: BMC)

The primary goal of the UMZF composition competition is to encourage and support the creation of new Hungarian pieces of music, as well as to establish lasting cooperation between composers, chamber ensembles and orchestras in the promotion of new works and contemporary music. In honor of the 75th anniversary of the death of Béla Bartók, the organizers of the competition were expecting entries in the orchestral category this year that include the fugue theme of Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, or entries that were inspired by this fugue theme. The requirement for chamber pieces was to include a trumpet solo.

The competition, which closed on 25 August, received a total of 28 entries from Hungary and across the border. 16 new Hungarian works were submitted in the chamber music category and 12 in the orchestra category. The youngest applicant was 19 years old, and 3 female composers were also among the applicants this year. The competition was open to composers under the age of forty who consider themselves of Hungarian heritage.

The musical works were praised by a prestigious jury consisting of Péter Eötvös, Géza Gémesi, László Kovács, János Pilz, Gergely Vajda, and three professors of the Liszt Academy: Tamás Pálfalvi, Zsolt Serei and László Tihanyi. The finalist chamber pieces were performed by the UMZE Chamber Ensemble on 10 October at BMC, conducted by László Tihanyi and featuring trumpet player Tamás Pálfalvi, while the orchestral works were performed at the MÜPA Festival Theater on 11 October, by the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, with Gergely Vajda as conductor.

UMZF 2020 was held as a programme of the CAFe Budapest Contemporary Music Festival, and sponsored by the Ministry of Human Resources.