By JOEL SACHS

Hungary—the land of amazing pastries and musical Gypsies, a celebrated anti-Communist revolt, and an impossible language! Musicians know of Liszt, Bartok, Kodaly, Dohnanyi, Szigeti, Reiner, and two Gyorgys—Sandor and Szell. (Gyorgy is pronounced more or less like George, its English equivalent.) Some music lovers also know the two composer-Gyorgys: Kurtag and Ligeti. Did a small country that produced so many great musicians just strike it lucky? Actually, Hungary is not so small: its population of 10 million exceeds Austria's by 25 percent. Yet we assume that Austria should produce composers almost by right, whereas Hungary's output still causes surprises. The composer Gyorgys are just part of the adventure of discovery.

Diego Masson will conduct the closing concert of the 2007 Focus! festival on February 2. (Photo by Katie Vandyck )

Hungary has a long and glorious artistic history. When Bartok returned to Budapest after a scholarship for study in Vienna, it was by no means just because of a provincial longing for his native land. Budapest, a lively artistic center, was a powerful antidote to the stuffiness of Imperial Vienna. Its small group of forward-thinking composers was growing, and might have developed spectacularly if not for the psychopathic politics of the next decades.

After the Second World War, Eastern Europe was behind the lines of the Red Army. The Soviets, determined to prevent the Nazi murderers who had destroyed their country from rising from the ashes, installed their puppets throughout the governments that they controlled. The ensuing repression led East Germany, Poland, and Hungary to attempt revolution in the mid-'50s. When Hungary's uprising was brutally crushed, any artistic experimentation looked hopeless, as in the Soviet Union. Severe shortages of information made a firsthand assessment of the situation extremely difficult. The new arts seemed doomed.

Yet the worst fears were not realized. Although the Hungarian Communist party had its cultural enforcers, interesting composers such as Andras Mihaly and Endre Szervanszky ("sz" is pronounced like "s") wrote marvelous music in up-to-date styles. Some of the leading composers of "experimental music" formed the New Music Studio to provide mutual support. While their work was permitted, such composers were obstructed by the musical bureaucrats and performances were few. One had to be close to the scene to know that a Hungarian avant-garde existed. Yet despite their suspiciousness of fresh ideas, the Communists saw that a healthy musical life was desirable. Wherever they ruled, they created a fine infrastructure for it. In Hungary, as in the Soviet Union, limited editions of unusual music were published and some of it was recorded.

The late Gyorgy Ligeti will be celebrated at this year's Focus! festival. (Photo by Kimmo Mantyla )

In the early '80s, Hungarian cultural officialdom began to promote Hungarian avant-garde music abroad, probably dreaming of hard currency receipts. The prestigious London-based publisher Boosey & Hawkes became the Western agency for Editio Musica Budapest, the Hungarian state publisher. Unlike the Soviets, who considered their avant-garde unworthy of promotion, the Hungarians marketed everything, including innovative music.

That new attitude brought me to the new Hungarians. One day in the mid-'80s, Boosey & Hawkes invited me to meet Balint Andras Varga, promotional representative of Editio Musica Budapest. Mr. Varga was, in essence, a traveling salesman with a suitcase of scores and recordings, who sought to interest performers around the world in performing Hungarian music. I was in his sights as co-director Continuum, which had already become known for performing music of Soviet avant-garde composers. I accepted many fine scores and recordings, but it was about five years—by which time Mr. Varga had become very impatient—before we could do something. The news that of Continuum planned a major concert of new Hungarian music did wonders for our relationship.

Simultaneously, the Soviet empire crumbled and the former client states became independent. As everywhere in the former East Bloc, the government-supported infrastructure for music disintegrated. Music was put on a market-economy basis, and the smaller constituencies like new music suffered badly. The state publishing houses, which had produced surprising amounts of unusual music, were threatened with collapse. Yet in Hungary and elsewhere, some publishers survived in new forms. Editio Musica Budapest pulled through and later—for better or worse—was bought by BMG, which proved to be a difficult partner. Balint Andras Varga's successor is Janos Demeny, a man of unrivalled knowledge, excellent taste, and a phenomenal desire to help Hungarian composers. Once again, however, the future is uncertain: BMG has sold its classical holdings to a new owner whose interest in serious music remains an open question.

Composer Gyorgy Kurtag will be given a belated 80th-birthday greeting. (Photo by Felvégi Andrea )

Although I have performed a fair amount of recent Hungarian music, my decision to include a work by Zoltan Jeney in Summergarden 2006 at MoMA prompted me to revisit Bartok's musical successors. I also knew that Ligeti was in very poor health and thought that a salute to him might be cheering. Furthermore, Kurtag had turned 80 in February, and the Hungarian revolution was turning 50. It seemed like the time had come for a Hungarian Focus! festival. Sadly, when Ligeti died in June, the planned salute became a memorial.

I urgently needed to refresh my acquaintance with Hungarian music, for while I was familiar with the middle generation—men now in their 50s and early 60s—I knew little of their recent music. Furthermore, I knew nothing of young composers. It was time to return to Budapest, where I could work intensively at the Budapest Music Center, an information library, and at Editio Musica Budapest. By chance, having just made the decision to go there, I encountered the young Canadian composer Kati Agocs (who received her D.M.A. from Juilliard in 2005), walking down Broadway. She had recently returned from a trip to Hungary to research Hungarian composition since 1990. Kati kindly shared a pre-publication version of her article on the subject (published in the autumn 2006 edition of Musical Times), and generously gave me the names of people she thought I should see there, as well as composers whom she particularly admired. For a mind-bending July I decided to try to learn some Hungarian. That is not a task to be taken lightly; verbs have 17 cases, each of which has three versions depending upon the vowel of the verb stem. Needless to say, I did not get control of Hungarian in a month!

I spent the first week of August at the Budapest Music Center, which owns a staggering number of scores and recordings. But they are very short-staffed, are backlogged on cataloging, and have to keep the lights low to save money on electricity. The summer heat made the library very stuffy until a ferocious storm cleared the air. The staff could not have been more helpful. And the chief executive, an amazing go-getter, is converting a nearby industrial building into a real music center, with a library, rehearsal and performance spaces, a restaurant, and all that is needed to bring Budapest into the center of the new music in the European Union. Thanks to the generosity of the Budapest Music Center, Editio Musica Budapest, and Hungaroton Records (the former state recording company), I came back with an enormous stack of material. Old composer friends—with whom I ate far too much superb food—gave me additional recommendations of young composers. Everyone agreed about one peculiarity of their professional world: hardly any women in Hungary are composing.

As I write this report, the festival is only partly planned, but looks very exciting. Both Ligeti and Kurtag will be represented each night. The festival opens on January 26, with the New Juilliard Ensemble playing Kurtag's "... quasi una fantasia ...," Op. 27, No. 1, for piano and instrumental groups, and Ligeti's spectacular concert aria from his opera Le Grand Macabre, a scena that is so challenging that it is usually performed in a trumpet transcription. (It got its New York premiere on the very first New Juilliard Ensemble concert in 1993, with soprano Nancy Allen Lundy. Brenda Rae will sing it on January 26.)

Focus! 2007: The Magyar Legacy Hungarian Music After Bartok Peter Jay Sharp Theater Friday, Jan. 26-Friday, Feb. 2 Please see the Calendar of Events for more information.

Kurtag's work will mark the cimbalom debut of Juilliard percussion student Eric Roberts. Peter Eotvos, of the middle generation, will be represented by Snatches of a Conversation (2001), for double-belled trumpet, rapper, and ensemble. In addition, there will be works by Zsolt Durko, Andras Szollosy, and Zoltan Jeney.

The festival closes on February 2 with the Juilliard Orchestra, conducted by Diego Masson. The major work is Ligeti's devilishly difficult Violin Concerto. We had hoped to make the festival symmetrical by including Kurtag's Op. 27, No. 2, for double orchestra, but when the hunt for two cimbaloms reached a dead end, we settled on his magnificent Stele, which was performed on a Focus! program four years ago. Maestro Masson's program will also include Laszlo Tihanyi's 20 Night Impressions and Six Pieces for Orchestra by Endre Szervanszky.

The chamber concerts are in the process of being planned as I write this article. Works by Ligeti are in place, however—a group of solo harpsichord pieces, several piano etudes, the Sonata for Solo Viola, and the 10 Pieces for Wind Quintet. Once it is clear which pieces by Kurtag will be included, I shall face the stack of CDs and scores and valiantly try to select from a wealth of other riches. I hope that the result will be a cross-section of Hungarian music that will interest many other performers in finding repertory.

Joel Sachs, director of the New Juilliard Ensemble and the annual Focus! festival, has been a faculty member since 1970.