János Fürst

London Master Classes very much regret to announce the death of Maestro Janos Furst on January 3 2007 in Paris. The 2007 Conducting Course will be taken by Benjamin Zander.

Like a number of distinguished conductors, János Fürst began his musical career as a string player. He initially studied the violin at the Liszt Academy in his native Budapest and then at the Conservatory in Paris where he was awarded the Premier Prix. For the next decade János Fürst worked as an orchestra leader and in 1963 he founded the Irish Chamber Orchestra after which a full-time conducting career soon developed.

János Fürst has held posts as Chief Conductor and Music Director in Malmö, Aalborg, Dublin, Marseilles and Winterthur and was Chief Guest Conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra for a number of years. Since making his London debut in 1972, he has conducted all the major London Orchestras, and he is also a regular guest in the major European capitals and with leading orchestras in Israel, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. His performance of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain in the final concert of the London Symphony Orchestra's Bruckner Cycle was greeted with much acclaim.

In the operatic field, János Fürst spent nine years as Music Director of Marseilles Opera and has also been a regular Guest at the English National and Scottish Operas, and most recently at the Royal Stockholm Opera. Mr Fürst has succeeded in balancing his work in the concert hall with a passion for all forms of musical theatre. He conducted the Premier production of Peter Maxwell Davies's full length Ballet Salome in Copenhagen which was subsequently recorded for EMI.

Teaching is an activity that János Fürst has always been involved in, even though he does not have a formal education as a pedagogue. To him, teaching is a natural result of his activity and role as a conductor. He first began to give conducting lessons in Ireland during the 1980s at the Dublin Master Classes and from there, he started developing his own philosophy about the art of teaching conducting.

For János Fürst, conducting requires a totally different energy that the one needed by an instrumentalist in that it is an intellectual movement of communication directed towards other beings, whilst the player can focus his energy directly into the instrument and establish a one to one relationship.

János Fürst has developed a strong insight into the activity of teaching conducting and while pursuing regular master classes in various schools in Europe and Australia, it is actually only in 1997 when he was invited as a professor in the Paris Conservatoire, that his role as a teacher became effective. Since then, János Fürst has developed an substantial and personal approach to conducting which has led to the international recognition of a few notorious young talents (including François Xavier Roth, winner of the Donatella Flick Competition 2000; Christophe Mangou winner of the Donatella Flick Competition 2002; and Vsevolod Polonsky, Dutilleux Prize Winner for composition, 1999) and to the birth of a very specific school of teaching.