Conductor Máté Hámori is a dominant figure in Hungarian music scene, whose innovative and versatile pursuit aims at promoting classical music as extensively as possible. His original youth lectures and ambitiously compiled thematic concert series equally serve to attract new audiences for the genre of classical music.
He is a regular guest of most of the national orchestras and has conducted at major festivals in many European countries. 2013. Since 2013, he has been a permanent conductor of the Hungarian State Opera House, where he has conducted numerous opera and ballet premieres and performances. His youth programs are nationally renowned: tens of thousands of children in more than 100 different municipalities have attended his dozens of self-developed performances. His performances interactively combine the elements of poetry, stand-up comedy and theater with high-level music-making, with experience-based education in the focus. His social integration initiatives are of particular importance, including the Beethoven project aiming at giving deaf and hearing-impaired people access to live music, and the Common Voice Program realized in co-operation with young people from deprived backgrounds, typically Romani. (highlighted speech bubble)
He took over the artistic direction of the Danubia Zenekar in 2013, and since then the orchestra has undergone a complete professional and structural renewal. He has launched a number of new series with the ensemble, which are usually sold-out and attract younger and younger audiences. The A Way to Music site, developed during the first Covid outbreak as a kind of musical Netflix to help discover classical music that suits the individual, and the SingRoute music education platform, which provides experience-based music education in schools, are innovations at global level. (highlighted speech bubble) As a result of his work, Danubia has become one of Hungary’s most characteristic and decisive workshops. In his concerts, he interprets the often forgotten masterpieces of the repertoire with suggestive precision, and in addition to several world premieres, he has also given the Hungarian premieres of works by Shostakovich and Britten.
He has been awarded the Hungarian Golden Order of Merit, the Óbuda Prize for Culture and the Liszt Ferenc Prize for his artistic work, and in 2019 he was named one of the 50 most influential figures in culture.
Beethoven Project
In 2020, the world celebrated the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth. To mark this occasion, Máté Hámori launched the Beethoven Project, an unparalleled project that aims to bring the experience of live music to the people who can mostly identify with the great composer’s drama: the deaf and hearing-impaired. During the orchestral concerts, audience members use balloons, contact speakers or even special hearing aids to experience the ripples of the music, and the bravest ones can take a seat on stage among the orchestra members, touching the instruments and getting up close and personal with the music. The project, which has been a huge success, has already provided hundreds of hearing-impaired and deaf people with a new community experience and is a great inspiration for the musicians involved.
Common Voice
In 2013, the Maltese Charity Service launched the Maltese Symphony program, which – based on a Venezuelan model – aims to provide instrumental education and musical experiences to disadvantaged children, typically living in small towns. The program aims to promote integration, community building, motivation and opportunity, and with these in mind, Máté Hámori envisioned the further expansion of the program in 2019. In the Common Voice program, the most diligent music students prepare for, in cooperation with the artists of Danubia Orchestra, performances in which a variety of music, spanning from Gypsy melodies to classical citations, can peacefully go together, and they will perform these works (composed by Rezső Ott) together at the Academy of Music and other prestigious venues. 2022. At the beginning of 2022, the children’s rehearsal room in Tarnazsadányi was robbed by unknown persons, their instruments were stolen and the dulcimer was burned down. With the help of one million HUF raised through the selfless donation of the audience of Danubia, the orchestra was able to order a new instrument to replace the destroyed one.
A Way to Music
With the emergence of the covid epidemic, rapid responses were needed to keep classical music performers and audience connected. This is the purpose of the classical music video sharing site, which was Máté Hámori’s brainchild. The novelty is that the videos, ranging from a duration of few seconds to several hours, can be browsed not by composer or title, but by moods ranked into 40 categories, so even those with less musical knowledge can quickly find the music suiting their mood. The site is growing dynamically and now contains more than 600 different videos, and in 2021 it won the Website of the Year award in its category.
SingWay
Máté Hámori’s key mission is to give children a musical experience. In Hungary, the lucky situation is that children receive special singing lessons, albeit only once a week. However, the effectiveness of these lessons is highly variable, given that neither the methods nor the curricular requirements and recommendations have evolved much over the past decades. To help teachers and students alike in this situation, Énekút.hu (SingWay) provides complete, experiential lesson plans based on concert and educational videos from the Út a zenéhez.hu (A Way to Music) website. The lesson plans depart from the usual chronological, music-historical approach, instead taking a holistic approach to valuable music and its place in people’s lives, using older and newer, even contemporary music, and starting from the themes of seasons, moods and stories. The conductor’s aim is to make the site available in all Hungarian-speaking schools soon.
