István Varga

Born in Subotica, he studied in Budapest at the Liszt Academy, in Belgrade at the Academy of Music, and at the Conservatiore of Paris. Varga studied cello with Viktor Jakovcic, Mező László from the Bartók quartet, André Navarra and Maurice Gendron, and chamber music with Rados Ferenc and György Kurtág. He returned to his home country to teach at the Belgrade and Novi Sad Academies of Music. He founded and directed the Camerata Academica Chamber Music Orchestra and the Goldberg String Trio, which quickly became the best known orchestras in the former Yugoslavia. As the director of the Novi Sad Celebration of Music he organised grand international chamber music festivals and also performed a lot. Several renowned composers wrote compositions for him and he won the Yugoslavian Composers Association Award. He performed at the most prestigious concert venues, such as the Wingmore Hall in London, the Salle Gaveau in Paris, and the Rachmaninov Hall in Moscow. He regularly teaches master courses in Hungary, Croatia, France and all around the world. Until 1999 he lived and worked in the former Yugoslavia where he was a professor of cello and chamber music at the Academy of Belgrade as well as being responsible for the string department at the Academy of the Arts in Novi Sad. Then he moved to Hungary in 1999 and currently teaches at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music.

István Varga as chamber musician in the past few years has been performing such a well-known stars for example: Valerij Affanasijev, Zoltán Kocsis, Tibor Varga, Konstantin Bogino, Bobby Mc Ferrin, Ian Fountain, Aleksandar Madjar, Jasminka Stancul, Albert Markov, Marianne Piketty, Pavel Vernikov, András Keller, Marine Yashvili, J. M.Philips-Varjabedian. His permanent chamber music performing partners are Balázs Fülei pianist and Péter Kováts cellist; they frequently give concerts locally as well as internationally. In the past the most prestigious European composers wrote pieces personally for him Despic, Eric, Suklar, Stefanovic.