He trained to be a teacher at St Paul’s Cheltenham, followed Peter Maxwell
Davies at Cirencester School, then was offered a county award to study for B.Mus
at the Royal Academy of Music. Here he also studied organ, piano accompaniment,
and conducting, which led him to create and run his own Academic Festival Orchestra.
Conducting engagements followed with the BBC Studio Strings, touring musicals such as Fiddler on the Roof and West Side Story. In 1971, he arranged and conducted new music for Robert Helpmann’s Peter Pan at the London Coliseum, and in 1978, he attended the repetiteur’s course at the London Opera Centre, and has since played for many singers, and opera and ballet companies. In 1997, he conducted Bartók's Music for strings, percussion and celesta at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, and in 2004, he motivated an Imre Varga statue of Bartók to enhance London SW7.
As an organist he has played in most English Cathedrals, but in 1978, his debut at the Royal Festival Hall in London heralded recital tours to Australia, France, Germany, Holland and Siberia, with return visits to Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Malaysia and the USA. Pieces have been written for him by Michael Berkeley and Paul Patterson, and he gave the first East European performance of Petr Eben's Job.
His
appearances on BBC TV and all four radio channels include organ parts at the
Proms, features on The Organist Entertains and a live Poulenc Organ Concerto.
He has also worked in the Belle Vue Circus Band in Manchester, and for four
years he ran a Yamaha Music School, but his most unusual assignment was for
the Marine Society, as organ tutor to the crew of a refrigerated cargo vessel
on voyages around Africa, and on the SS Uganda on six voyages of troop movement
to the Falklands.
Born of an Hungarian mother who died in his infancy, he is now co-chair of
the British Hungarian Fellowship, a Vice-president of the Peter Warlock Society,
and has written for The Times, and adjudicated Music Festivals, twice in Hong
Kong.
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