András Gábor Virágh Won Istvánffy Benedek Award
The prize to be awarded annually to a composer under 40 was presented by the Hungarian Composers’ Union to András Gábor Virágh for his opera Femme Fatale 2200111XXG on 11th October.
András Gábor Virágh has been the Titular Organist of the Saint Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest since May 2010. From September 2013, he has studied in the composition DLA program of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music Doctoral School, and he has also been a lecturer for music theory and formal analysis at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music. His professional career so far has been crowned by two national organ competition wins as well as three domestic and three international awards at composition competitions. In 2011 he was awarded the Junior Prima Prize. He graduated from the class of Gyula Fekete at the Composition Department of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in 2013, and in the same year he was presented with the Composition Prizes of the Hungarian Academy of Arts and the Aurora Musis Amica Foundation. Since 2014 his works have been published by the Ostinato Musikverlag in Germany.
Operatic sketches - Femme Fatale 2200111XXG (Photo by Liszt Academy / Balázs Mohai)
About the creation of Femme Fatale 2200111XXG, which draws on the trash culture of B-movies, András Gábor Virágh recalled that in late 2013 he took notice of a call for application for the yearly opera exam at the Liszt Academy with the requirement to submit an 18-20 minute mini-opera. Of the four themes given in the announcement – horror, thriller, western and sci-fi – Virágh had evidently chosen the last one. As for the unusual choice of topic the composer noted that even as a child he was attracted more to the transcendental than the worldly matters.
The libretto of András Gábor Virágh’s first opera was written by András Almási-Tóth. In regard to the joint work, the composer said, ”Before I set about composing the music for a libretto, I keep reading the text for weeks. I need that to learn it word by word, so that the form, naturally determined by the text, starts to take shape in me unconsciously. The same process was going on in the case of the futuristic scenario of Femme Fatale 2200111XXG created by András Almási-Tóth.”
The award named after the 18th-century composer Benedek Isvánffy has been granted by the Hungarian Composers’ Union since 1999 to recognize the work of composers under age 40.
Congratulations!