Artist database

Zsolt Serei was born in 1954, in Takácsi, Hungary. He early started learning music, first he played the piano. Later he studied the trombone under the direction of György Zilcz and József Nagy, and composition under István Fekete Győr. At the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music he received his degree in composition (1979) as a student of Endre Szervánszky and Emil Petrovics, and conducting (1982) in the class of András Kórodi and Ervin Lukács. As a private student Mr. Serei has also studied under Zoltán Jeney and Albert Simon. He has been a member of the New Music Studio since 1978 as a performer, conductor and a composer.

He has been a teacher at the faculty of composition of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music since 1986. In 1989 he founded the instrumental group @@KAR_74##, which has become one of the most significant base of contemporary music-making in Hungary. Componensemble has had Budapest premieres of pieces by Pierre Boulez, György Kurtág or Morton Feldman. Their repertoire includes international and Hungarian contemporary chamber works, and among others they have made CD-, radio- and TV-recordings of works by Gyula Csapó, János Decsényi, Barnabás Dukay, Zoltán Jeney, György Kurtág, József Sári, László Sáry, József Soproni, András Szőllősy, László Tihanyi, László Vidovszky and others. As a conductor of the ensemble Mr. Serei was attending at the Music Biennale Zagreb, the Warsaw Autumn Festival, the Melos Festival

In 1991 he conducted Pierre Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître, and Dérive with the Dutch Nieuw Ensemble. Mr. Serei's chamber piece, Rege, was performed in Brussels in 1982, and orchestral work, Calyx, was played in Budapest at the ISCM Festival in 1986. The Componensemble and Zsolt Serei was awarded numerous times by the Hungarian Bureau of Authors’ Rights awards several times for their excellent rendering of Hungarian new music. In 1999 Mr. Serei won the Music Award of the Soros Foundation, and in the same year his opera, One Minute Stories (based on short stories of István Örkény) was performed at the Budapest Autumn Festival.

In 2010 he was awarded with Béla Bartók-Ditta Pásztory Award.


see also: Serei Zsolt - conductor