Chamber music mastercourse with Kati Debretzeni and Prof. Malcolm Bilson

The master course is open for students and musicians who are interested in baroque techniques. You may apply with Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert chamber music for strings and fortepiano ensembles. The participation fee is provided free of charge for the students of the Liszt Academy and the Conservatory of Béla Bartók. Other students may apply as active participants (5000 HUF/day or 20 €/day) or passive applicants (2500 HUF/day or 10 €/day).

Debreczeni Kati, or better known worldwide as Kati Debretzeni, was born in Transylvania, and moved to Israel at the age of 15. She studied the violin with Ora Shiran in Tel-Aviv, and later her specialised in the baroque violin. She studied baroque violin techniques Music with Catherine Mackintosh and Walter Reiter at the Royal College of  Music in London. Currently she is the leader and frequent soloist of the English Baroque Soloists (J. E. Gardiner) and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (F. Bruggen, S. Rattle, V. Jurowski, I. Fischer). Her violin playing can be heard in many prized recordings.She is the director of several ensembles in Israel, Poland, Norway, Iceland and the United Kingdom, and she holds baroque violin master courses at the Royal Conservatory of Music in the Hague.

Kati Debretzeni (photo: Joe Plommer)

Malcolm Bilson began his pioneering activity in the early 1970s as a performer of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert on late 18th- and early 19th-century pianos. Since then he has proven to be a key contributor to the restoration of the fortepiano to the concert stage and to fresh recordings of the "mainstream" repertory. Bilson has recorded the three most important complete cycles of works for piano by Mozart: the piano concertos with John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists for Deutsche Grammophon Archiv, the piano-violin Sonatas with Sergiu Luca for Nonesuch records, and the solo piano sonatas for Hungaroton. His traversal on period pianos of the Schubert piano sonatas (including the so-called incomplete sonatas), likewise on Hungaroton, was completed in 2003. In 2005 a single CD of Haydn sonatas appeared on the Claves label, and in 2008 his first recording on an English pianoforte of Haydn, Dussek and Cramer was released on Bridge Records. Bilson, a member of the Cornell Music Faculty since 1968, is also Adjunct Professor at both the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York and the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, Hungary. He gives fortepiano workshops at various locations in the United States and Europe, as well as master classes and lectures (generally in conjunction with solo performances) around the world. An educational video entitled "Knowing the Score" was released in 2005, in which Bilson discusses the question: Do we really know how to read the notation of the so-called 'classical' masters? A second DVD titled "Performing the Score", was released in early September, 2011.  If we now know how to read notation, how can it be realized in sound? (www.malcolmbilson.com). Malcolm Bilson is a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, has an honorary doctorate from Bard College and is the recipient of the 2006 James Smithson Bicentennial Medal.

Kati Debretzeni and Malcolm Bilson's sonata concert is on 12 February and the final concert of the master course with the participated ensembles is on 15 February.

For more information on the application and other details with regard to the master course, see the Students' Notice Board.