Look at the lands that make up the European continent and note how a few nations inevitably feature more often than others in roll-calls of big names in the musical world. From a population of just over five million today, at least a dozen Finnish conductors are now front-rank personalities, and throughout the 20th century, Hungary, with a current population of around ten million, supplied classical music with seemingly endless stars from its talent sheds: conductors like Doráti, Fricsay, Kertesz, Ormandy, Reiner, Solti and Szell as well as instrumentalists such as Anda, Starker, Szigeti and Annie Fischer. More recently, the firmament in the land of the Magyars has not been shining quite so brightly, but András Keller is determined to do all he can to nurture emerging musical stars in his homeland.
When we met at the Guildhall School of Music, where Keller is Professor of Violin and was appointed earlier this year to the Béla Bartók International Chair, he was keen to stress the importance of thorough teaching and a familiarity with the entire repertory. In doing so he cast a rueful backward glance to the 1970s, the most recent “golden period”, in his view, when his own teachers were Ferenc Rados (“one of the great musical gurus of all time”), Dénes Kovács and above all György Kurtág, whom together with Sándor Végh he reveres as the guiding-spirits in his own musical development. Teaching is all about making a difference - adding value, in the modern parlance - and being able to point to the results.
Drawing on his own rich experience as a soloist and later concertmaster of two orchestras in Budapest as well as the Keller Quartet which he founded in 1987, his most recent project has been the strengthening of the artistic profile of Concerto Budapest Symphony Orchestra. Exactly one century after its formation in 1907 as the Post Office Orchestra (Leipzig’s similarly civic Gewandhausorchester is, after all, a creation of merchant tailors), initially with amateur musicians, Keller became its Chief Conductor and Artistic Director, and two years later renamed the now entirely professional ensemble Concerto Budapest. It has given young Hungarian musicians a unique opportunity to showcase their talents, though some ten per cent come from the international field, including the orchestra’s concertmaster, Miranda Liu, herself a graduate of Budapest’s Liszt Academy and appointed to her current position at the tender age of 19.
Passionate commitment to the cause of music is what Keller looks for in his musicians, and he sees his own role primarily as that of a teacher, requiring on average four four-hour rehearsals for each concert. “This is never enough,” he willingly admits, but underlines that a latter-day Celibidache or Kleiber would find it impossible to be granted the working conditions they once enjoyed. The repertoire is consciously and deliberately as wide as possible, since “musicians should be able to play anything and everything”. This flexibility is also reflected in the attention given to contemporary music. As Keller says, “I am a Kurtág student and so this is my mission.” There is naturally enough a special focus on younger Hungarian composers, and part of Keller’s artistic direction is to arrange wherever possible for follow-up performances of the works that he commissions. I asked him about the short shelf-life of so much contemporary music. “I help to give life to these pieces,” he rejoins. “Once it is performed, it is alive. It can always be performed again.” This commitment is evident in the annual Day of Listening, to be staged this year in Budapest at Müpa on 25 November, when Keller’s orchestra will be involved in 12 hours of playing contemporary works.