András Ligeti

Hungarian violinist and conductor András Ligeti was born in Pécs in south-west Hungary on 5 August 1953. Influenced by his musician father Andor Ligeti, a conductor, and his grandfather János Ligeti (1895-1975), a composer and church cantor-conductor, he showed a keen interest in music as a child.

He studied in Budapest at the Franz Liszt Academy.  He won first prizes in two violin competitions - the Leó Weiner in 1975 and the Indiana University Sonata Vecsernye Competition (Bloomington, USA) in 1980.

From 1977 until 1985 he worked at Hungarian State Opera, first as concertmaster and then, from 1981, as a conductor.

A Georg Solti scholarship enabled him to study conducting at the Vienna Academy of Music with Karl Österreicher from 1980.

Towards the middle of the 1980s he began to become noticed on the international scene, working increasingly as a guest conductor internationally. During his career his international engagements included those in Australia, Germany, Israel, Japan, Korea, Norway and the UK.

From 2001 he became artistic director and first permanent guest conductor of the West Australia Symphony Orchestra, and from 2005 until 2007 he was music director of the Taipei Symphony Orchestra in Taiwan.

András Ligeti died on 19 September 2021, aged sixty-eight, having made lots of recordings and radio broadcasts from his extremely wide repertoire.