Boldizsár Kiss finished his MA studies in 2015 as a choir conductor at the Liszt Ferenc Music Academy Budapest and HfM Hanns Eisler Berlin with Péter Erdei, Jörg-Peter Weigle and Csaba Somos amongst others.
He is the artistic director of the Vass Lajos Symphony Orchestra, and worked as an assistant conductor with the choir of the Liszt Ferenc Music Academy.
In 2013 he won the First Prize and Audience Special Award on the Rezső Lantos Choral Conducting Competition.
In his application for the masterclass, Boldizsár wrote: I would like to
- Take rehearsal with a professional chamber choir
- Take rehearsal in foreign language
- To get to know new perspectives in choir working
- To get new international relationships
Angeliki Ploka (Greece, 1990) studied piano, music theory and pedagogy in Trikala and Thessaloniki (GR). A Sarolta Kodály Scholarship made it possible for her to study for a diploma in advanced choral conducting at the Kodály Institute of the Liszt Ferenc Academy in Hungary. She now continues to study there with an Onassis scholarship, working for her MA in Kodály Music Pedagogy. As singer and as conductor, she has performed extensively with various ensembles. She is now studying singing and conducting in the Royal Conservatoire The Hague (NL)
She writes how her work as singer helped her to focus on “various aspects of singing performance such as stage perfomance/interpretation, body awareness, physical consciousness, communication with the audience etc. Eventually, all these aspects contributed to the development of my conducting skills, to my experience of the close connection of body-voice-stage that each singer should feel, the communication between the conductor, the choir and the audience.”