András Keller: ‘These were people with young families. Their electricity was switched off. There was no money’

András Keller’s life began similar to many other professional musicians, when he took up the violin at the age of seven. But it quickly took the first of what would turn out to be a series of unexpected turns.

“I was quite good – not exceptional, but I was winning competitions for young people,” says the leader of the celebrated Keller string quartet, who makes his Irish conducting debut with the Concerto Budapest Symphony Orchestra next week. The first turnaround came when he caught scarlet fever at the age of 10 and had to stay at home for five or six weeks. “The parents went to work,” he says. “I stayed home, alone, and I discovered music.”

His father, an economist, was a passionate amateur musician with a large collection of LPs and scores, which Keller started exploring. While laid up, he made what he calls “a lifelong real friendship with music. And after that, everything had changed.”

He went to the Liszt Academy in his native Budapest at the age of 14, in the mid-1970s – “one of the golden ages”, he calls it, “with incredible teachers, tutors, professors and a unique atmosphere”.

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Before becoming a string quartet leader, Keller had been pursuing a career as a touring soloist. Then Hungary’s leading conductor of the time, János Ferencsik (1907-1984), invited him to become leader of what was then the Hungarian State Symphony Orchestra. Very soon he also became leader of the then newly established Budapest Festival Orchestra, which rapidly became Hungary’s flagship musical ensemble.

But “everything changed when I heard Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, Op 132, with the Amadeus Quartet”, Keller says. He was gripped by the Heiliger Dankgesang, the work’s slow movement, whose full title translates as Holy Song of Thanksgiving of a Convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian Mode. It affected him so deeply that he now wanted to devote his time to quartet playing. “It was a strange decision,” he says, because he had played lots of chamber music at the academy, including string quartets. “But I was not very interested at that time.”

Another key stage was playing in a concert of Schubert’s Octet and Beethoven’s Septet with wind players led by the clarinettist Kálmán Berkes. The other string players from that concert would populate the Keller Quartet, but only because the viola player, Zoltán Gál, “started pushing me, day after day”. Keller resisted the pressure for a year.

At first the players could only rehearse at night. “We met every night, 10pm, 10.30pm. Thinking back, it was very abnormal. Four mad Hungarian guys, who met in the house of a painter, a friend, playing all night, and listening to the great quartets, Amadeus, Busch, Végh. It was maybe the best time in my life, ever. Very soon it became very serious. The quartet became very, very successful in a very short time.”

I chose the quartet because my personal feeling was that the communal sound of four very strong souls meeting together for one passion ... this is above all else

“We had incredible teachers,” he says, naming the composer György Kurtág, the pianist and chamber musician Ferenc Rados, the composer and cellist András Mihály, and Sándor Devich, the second violinist of the Bartók String Quartet. “They were absolutely the greatest. And also Sándor Végh in Salzburg.” Soon Keller and his friends were winning competitions, and he felt forced to decide whether he was going to devote himself to string quartets.

“I chose the quartet because my personal feeling was that the communal sound of four very strong souls meeting together for one passion ... this is above all else. This started our real career.” They found themselves with a very busy concert schedule while, in parallel, having to study and learn the repertoire as they went.

But there was a heavy price for the two decades they spent on the road. “I lost my country,” he says. They played everywhere “but not in Hungary. Everywhere we were praised, but in Hungary they didn’t remember us. That was so hard. I decided I had to find something to do in my own country. My daughter was growing up, and I hardly saw her. I wanted to come home.”

That’s what brought him to the Concerto Budapest Symphony Orchestra, which was founded in 1907 as the orchestra of the post office and which, when he came to it, was performing as the orchestra of the German-owned Magyar Telekom. “The orchestra,” he says, “has a long history, the second oldest in Hungary, but was not among the best, and I wanted to rebuild it.” What it did have was “a big tradition and strong commitment”.

In 2007 he secured the post of music director against international competition. But his timing was terrible. Shortly thereafter the Telekom support dried up because of a change in the company’s cultural policy. He made the extraordinary decision to keep going, to buy time and make the case for government support.

By 2011 he found himself having to invest everything he had in the orchestra. When the money ran out, he says, “the orchestra stayed with me. Right with me, without salary, for more than 10 months. It was a huge commitment. These were people with young families. Their electricity was switched off. There were big family tragedies. There was no money. Finally the government took on the orchestra. Not with strong support. But they gave us the chance to survive.” The funding has risen, and currently, after two years of cuts “because of the economic crisis”, the annual support stands at 1.6 billion forints, or about €4.1 million.

“Still not the best,” he says, “but strong. And we can see a future, because the orchestra has not only very good musicians but very good people. Everybody can hear that they are people with a soul and a heart. This appears in every note that we play. And it wins respect from others.”

The greatest thing is not just to play together but to listen to each other. And I’m bringing that to the orchestra

The conducting itself, he says, “has enriched my musical life, my musicianship and my musical perspective. As leader of a string quartet, I was 90 per cent a soloist ... Okay, 80 per cent. It was a very well-organised group. Great experience, everyone knew what do do. But the greatest thing is not just to play together but to listen to each other. And I’m bringing that to the orchestra.”

Listening to a single part, he says, “That’s wonderful, that’s good. But to listen to the others, not just go with the conductor’s beat. To understand the meaning of the notes, which is never straightforward. To listen to one more line, two, three ... to listen to at least six different kinds of parts in the music. This is very difficult. To be a complex musician, you must know, from your perspective, the whole piece.”

Moving towards his goals, he says, has been “a long, long fight. Because the improvement of the orchestra was much, much higher than the support. It was a struggle. But music is stronger than anything in the world.”

András Keller conducts the Concerto Budapest Symphony Orchestra in Mozart’s Symphony No 40 in G minor, Bartók’s Piano Concerto No 3 (with Pierre-Laurent Aimard) and Beethoven’s Symphony No 3 (Eroica) at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Tuesday, September 19th, at 8pm