EXTRA CONCERT! 50th Anniversary concert with Kobayashi Ken-Ichiro

In the spring of 1974, the Hungarian Television organised its first International Conductors’ Competition. This was an extremely rare and highly respectable initiative at the time, even by international standards, and has since become a tradition in many countries. The competition consisted of four rounds, similarly to sports competitions: qualifying, quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals. In the first round, the MÁV Symphony Orchestra was playing while all the candidates stepped on the conductor's podium. This was the longest round and the one with the highest stakes: qualification or immediate drop-out. The winner of the competition was the then 34-year-old Japanese conductor, Ken’Ichiro Kobayashi, whose impressive conducting skills and equally humble and kind demeanour made him a favourite with the audience and the musicians of the orchestras he was performing with. The second runner-up, Ádám Medveczky, was similarly popular. The competition has launched an illustrious international career for Kobayashi, so much that he may not even keep track of how many orchestras he has led in his past fifty years of success. One thing he does know and never fails to mention is that the first orchestra he conducted outside his native country was the Budapest MÁV Symphony Orchestra.

Since then, he has been invited back to Hungary many times and has conducted almost all the top orchestras of the country. After the death of János Ferencsik, he was the music director of the Hungarian State Symphony Orchestra for several years; however, he has cultivated his special friendship with the MÁV Symphony Orchestra throughout, which is proved by the fact that he has been the honorary guest conductor of the orchestra for many years.

The significance of the jubilee concert is enhanced by the fact that the soloist who Kobayashi has invited to perform Liszt's Piano Concerto in E flat major has a Japanese father and a Hungarian mother. Attila Kaneko Miyuji has spent half of his childhood in Japan and half in Hungary; his musical education began in Hungary at the Bartók Béla Music School in Vác, and continued in Japan. He speaks Hungarian well.

The MÁV Symphony Orchestra expresses its appreciation of its old friend with fondness and pride, in hope of seeing him again.