UMZE Ensemble
UMZE Ensemble was formed in 1997, in response to an initiative by Zoltán Rácz, Artistic Director of the Amadinda Percussion Group. The Ensemble has become a defining feature of musical life in Hungary, it presents its own concert series in Budapest, plays at the most important music centres in the country and also appears abroad in such prestigious Festivals and Concert Halls as the Carnegie Hall in New York, the Wiener Festwochen, the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, the Avignon Festival and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. As one the main focuses of its activities UMZE Ensemble commissions and plays new compositions at most of its concerts. World premieres of the last 25 years include György Kurtág’s Four Poems by Anna Ahmatova which was premiered at the Carnegie Hall and most recently in March 2023 Péter Eötvös’ Fermata at the Budapest Music Centre. In December 2023 UMZE was one of the featured Ensembles at the ISCM Festival in Johannesburg. UMZE Ensemble and its former Artistic Director Zoltán Rácz was also the initiator and a participant of a multi-year project with Mupa Budapest, where the complete works of György Ligeti were presented. UMZE Ensemble often collaborates with institutions such as Neue Oper Wien or Mupa Budapest on theatre projects which resulted at performances of George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill or Jörg Widman’s Das Gesicht im Spiegel among many others. Since 2005 UMZE Ensemble has been supported by the New Hungarian Music Association (UMZE), which aims to act as the spiritual heir to the New Hungarian Music Society originally founded in 1911 by Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. At the founding of the Association in 20005, leading Hungarian musicians of the highest calibre were the signatories, among others György Ligeti, György Kurtág, Péter Eötvös, Ferenc Rados, Miklós Perényi, and Zoltán Jeney. The current Artistic Director of the Ensemble is Gregory Vajda, and the President of the Association is composer Balázs Horváth.