András Keller
András Keller is a violinist of the highest international reputation, founder of the acclaimed Keller Quartet, and the music director and first conductor of Concerto Budapest. Keller was born in Budapest in 1960 and took up the violin at the age of 7. Aged 14 he was admitted to the Liszt Academy of Music, where his teachers included György Kurtág, a composer with whom he has maintained a lifelong association. He was also a student of the legendary violinist Sándor Végh in Salzburg.
In 1983, Keller won the Hubay Violin Competition, and was subsequently invited by János Ferencsik to be the leader of Hungary's National State Orchestra. He also served as concertmaster of the Budapest Festival Orchestra from 1984 to 1991. In 1987 Keller, along with fellow students from the Budapest Academy – János Pilz (violin), Zoltán Gál (viola) and Otto Kertész (cello) – formed the Keller Quartet, which won both [...]
András Keller is a violinist of the highest international reputation, founder of the acclaimed Keller Quartet, and the music director and first conductor of Concerto Budapest. Keller was born in Budapest in 1960 and took up the violin at the age of 7. Aged 14 he was admitted to the Liszt Academy of Music, where his teachers included György Kurtág, a composer with whom he has maintained a lifelong association. He was also a student of the legendary violinist Sándor Végh in Salzburg.
In 1983, Keller won the Hubay Violin Competition, and was subsequently invited by János Ferencsik to be the leader of Hungary's National State Orchestra. He also served as concertmaster of the Budapest Festival Orchestra from 1984 to 1991. In 1987 Keller, along with fellow students from the Budapest Academy – János Pilz (violin), Zoltán Gál (viola) and Otto Kertész (cello) – formed the Keller Quartet, which won both the Evian and the Borciani competitions in 1991. András Keller was awarded the Liszt Prize as leader of the quartet in 1996.
The Keller Quartet’s ECM discography includes a revelatory performance of J. S. Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge; works for quartet by fellow Hungarians György Kurtág and György Ligeti; an innovatively sequenced anthology of slow movements, Cantante e tranquillo; and a programme that juxtaposes Schnittke’s Piano Quintet and Shostakovich’s last string quartet. Keller is also featured on a recording of Bartók’s 44 Duos for Two Violins hailed as “exemplary” by Misha Donat in BBC Music Magazine and of Kurtág’s intense and elliptical Kafka-Fragmente, which Anthony Holden described in the Observer as “a musical mosaic as vivid and telling as the work of the great novelist to whom it pays homage”.
András Keller was head of the Chamber Music Department at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music from 2012 to 2015, and from 2016 will be professor of violin at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He also teaches annually at the Aix-en-Provence Festival and is a regular guest of Yale University’s Norfolk Chamber Music Festival and the International Musicians Seminar Prussia Cove.
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