Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music and the Gnessin Academy in Moscow start cooperation

The Gnessin Academy was founded in 1895 by the three Gnessin sisters, who graduated with honours from the Moscow Conservatoire, and after the Second World War was headed by their brother, the composer Mikhail Fabianovich Gnessin. In the more than one hundred and twenty years since then, the institution has given the world a number of outstanding artists, including pianists Evgeny Kissin and Boris Berezovsky, both well-known in Hungary, and violinist Alina Ibragimova.

Dr. Andrea Vigh, President of the Liszt Academy of Music, said of the cooperation that it is a great pleasure to welcome representatives of the great Russian music culture with a long history and great prestige to the Liszt Academy. "Our past connects us by a thousand threads. Liszt first visited St. Petersburg in April 1842, followed by several trips and concerts. Lipót Auer moved to the city in 1868 and spent 49 years at the Conservatoire there, with Tchaikovsky and Glazunov dedicating their violin concertos to him," she added. As she pointed out, the current Russian guests also gave a two-day master class, and this and the closing concert are just the beginning of the cooperation between the institutions.

Aleksandr Ryzhinsky, Rector of the Moscow institution, said: they have partnerships with many prestigious European institutions, but the cooperation with the Liszt Academy of Music is outstanding because it is one of the most important universities in the world and the first in the region to sign a contract with the academy in Moscow. On how they intend to fulfil the agreement, he said: they are planning teacher and student exchange programmes and all the related activities, such as joint concerts or special thematic events, some of which have already started to be implemented. Ryzhinsky also recalled that there are significant links between Hungarian and Russian music, as Liszt's pupil Alexander Siloti was Rachmaninoff's teacher. Another link between the two institutions is that Rachmaninoff was strongly connected to the Gnessin School. Among his future plans, he said that in 2023 his institution would like to celebrate the 150th and 100th anniversaries of the births of Rachmaninov and George Ligeti with the Academy of Music.

Dr Andea Vigh Andrea and Aleksandr Ryzhinsky (photo: Liszt Academy / Posztós János)

Andrei Diev, professor of piano at the Gnessin Academy, also stressed that it is a coming together of two institutions with a long history, excellent teachers and students, and he is looking forward to the joint programmes. As a professor of Andrei Korobeinikov, a well-known pianist in Hungary and a jury member at the Bartók World Competition, he said that he could support longer master classes of one to two weeks, or even longer guest teacher projects, which would be concluded by a public student concert in Moscow and Budapest. This would be interesting because, in addition to the links, there are also differences in music education between the two countries, and experiencing these contrasts can be fruitful. Just as a performer has to "be" a bit German to perform a German composition, the same is true for Hungarian or Russian music literature, so it is useful for students and teachers alike to learn about different ways of thinking, he added. Asked who among the Hungarian pianists are important to him, he said he likes Annie Fischer because of her parents' and grandparents' recordings, and of his own generation, András Schiff, Dezső Ránki and the late Zoltán Kocsis are among those he has long looked up to. He took a liking to Schiff's performance style when he was young, when he heard the Hungarian artist at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.

Gábor Farkas, pianist and head of the Keyboard and Harp Department at the Liszt Academy, said of the cooperation: it is an extraordinary achievement that after a long absence, Hungarian and Russian music education, both with great traditions, are once again linked. In the earlier decades, a number of renowned Hungarian pianists of today's older generation studied in Russian institutions, but the links were severed around the fall of communism, he added. This is also why it is a milestone that the Liszt Academy of Music has signed an agreement with the renowned Gnessin Academy. Gábor Farkas also emphasised the Liszt connection mentioned by Alexander Ryzhinsky, by speaking of Alexander Siloti, adding that Liszt had a great influence on the Russian pianist world in general, as Anton Rubinstein, among others, was a student of Liszt. The head of the department also hopes that the cooperation will lead to more frequent and reciprocal master classes, longer-term teaching projects and joint concerts.