Barnabás Kelemen

He navigates with confidence through the entire violin repertoire, from solo to string quartet works and from early Baroque to contemporary music. He has given Hungarian and world premieres of works by Sofia Gubaidulina, György Ligeti, Alfred Schnittke, Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, Helena Winkelman, György Kurtág and many other composers. He regularly performs at the most prominent concert venues, including Carnegie Hall, the Concertgebouw, the Royal Festival Hall at London’s Southbank Centre, the Musikverein and the Berlin Philharmonic, and he is a frequent guest of the BBC Symphony, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra, to name but a few.

Barnabás Kelemen has worked with conductors such as Lorin Maazel, Michael Stern, Péter Eötvös, Iván Fischer and Gábor Takács-Nagy, and he established a long-term collaboration with late Zoltán Kocsis. He is also an avid conductor himself, and in recent seasons has led the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Chamber Orchestra.

Prestigious international violin and chamber music competitions have invited Barnabás Kelemen to serve as a jury member, and he has established two international violin competitions himself. He is the founder and artistic director of the Festival Academy Budapest, which he founded together with Katalin Kokas, with whom he also established the Kelemen Quartet in 2009.

Barnabás Kelemen has achieved outstanding results and first prizes at the world’s most prestigious competitions. For his artistry, he has been awarded the Liszt Prize, the Bartók-Pásztory Prize and the Kossuth Prize, which is awarded by the President of Hungary. He is also a recipient of the Gramophone Classical Music Award and the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary.

Barnabás Kelemen is currently a half-time professor at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. He performs on the “ex-Dénes Kovács” Guarneri del Gesú violin of 1742, which has been generously loaned to him by the Hungarian State, as well as on a period Baroque violin made by Januarius Gagliano in 1771.