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The Hungarian mezzo-soprano, Éva Lax, began her vocal studies at the Béla Bartók Specialist Music High School in Budapest, graduating and later taking a PhD in the Italian faculty of the Eötvös Loránd University in that city. Throughout this period her singing teacher was Ilona Adorján, and she also took part on several occasions in master-classes at the Innsbruck Early Music Festival Summer Academy, where she was a pupil of René Jacobs, Emma Kirkby and Jessica Cash. On three occasions between 1998 and 2000 she undertook further study in the early music field in Amsterdam.
A founder member of the Budapest-based ensemble Affetti Musicali, she has also performed with many other Hungarian groups both at home and abroad, including Capella Savaria, Concerto Armonico, Musica Profana, CantuS CorvinuS and Ars Longa. She has appeared as a soloist on numerous occasions in concerts with the Italian Bach Accademia in Padua and Venice. With all these groups she has made recordings. In France she has appeared at the Senlis and Avignon Festivals, and in the Musicora series in Paris, while in Hungary she is known for her performances at the early music festivals of Sopron, Fertőd and Budapest, working with such well-known musicians as Malcom Bilson, Nicholas McGegan and Miklós Spányi.
The core of Éva Lax’s repertoire is early music, ranging from the Middle Ages to the Viennese classics, but she has made frequent excursions into Romantic and contemporary music. Academically the most important fruit of her philological work has been a critical edition of the complete letters of Claudio Monteverdi, published by Olschki in Florence (1994), of which an edition in Hungarian appeared in 1998 under the Kávé Kiadó imprint. At her alma mater she now teaches the history of the Italian language and of music, and she is a professor of Singing at the Leo Weiner Conservatoire.
To date she has recorded ten CDs for Hungaroton: solo cantatas by Georg Philipp Telemann, Johann Adolf Hasse and Steffani, and operas and oratorios by George Frideric Handel, Antonio Caldara and Carissimi. For the Italian label Dynamic she has made four recordings of works by G.P. Telemann, Antonio Vivaldi and of cantatas by early Italian composers. |
