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The late Patric Standford may have written these short pieces deliberately to provoke our feedback. If so, his success is reflected in the rich range of readers' comments appearing at the foot of most of the pages.
Hungarian composer and teacher Sándor Balassa was born in Budapest on 20 January 1935. He studied music with Endre Szervánszky, and won the 1983 Hungarian state-sponsored Kossuth Prize.
Balassa's four operas were very successful, probably because his compositional style was very tonal. He also wrote large-scale orchestral pieces, plus many choral and chamber works. From the end of the 1980s he began to receive commissions from high profile organisations such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation and the Koussevitzky Foundation.
He created music programmes as a producer for Hungarian Radio (1964-80) and taught at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music (1981-96).
Sándor Balassa died on 14 May 2021, aged eighty-six.
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