BENEDEK CSALOG - baroque flute
Benedek Csalog Hungarian flautist, early music specialist, one of the leading players of the baroque flute, winner of most prestigious early music competitions inclusive the Concours Musica Antiqua, Bruges, Belgium, with 1st prize in the soloist category.At a very young age he already attended masterclasses by Barthold Kuijken. and Nicholas McGegan.. From 1987 he studied the baroque flute with Barthold Kuijken at The Royal Conservatory in The Hague, where he graduated in 1991. He has been performing as a soloist and chamber musician since 1987. He was invited to perform in most of the European countries, Japan, North and South America, and the Middle East. From 1992 to 2008 he was a teacher of the Baroque flute and chamber music at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Leipzig. From 2005 to 2008 he also taught at the Bydgoszcz Academy of Music in Poland, and was a guest teacher for Baroque Performance Practice at the Faculty of Music of the Széchenyi István University of Győr (Hungary) from 2016-2019.
He held masterclasses in Japan, Brazil, Hungary, Germany, Portugal, Slovakia, Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Belarus and The Netherlands; he is a regular guest professor at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory and the Gnessin Institute in Moscow. He was artistic director of the Summer Academy of Early Music in Tokaj / Hungary. Since 2016, he has been holding regular courses in Hungary, as well.
He took part in three international early music competitions, and has won all of them:
- 1995 NFA Baroque Flute Artist Competition, Orlando, USA, 1st prize
- 1996 Concours Musica Antiqua, Bruges, Belgium, 1st prize (soloist category)
- 2000 (?) Johann Heinrich Schmelzer Wettbewerb, Melk, Austria shared 2nd prize (first prize not awarded)
He produced 12 CD recordings as soloist including the Complete Flute Sonatas of Johann Sebastian Bach (label Ramée)
He also made a number of other chamber music recordings, as well as recordings of various orchestral and oratorical works, mainly as a member of German baroque ensembles. He participated in the recording of all harpsichord concertos of C.P.E.Bach as a member of the Concerto Armonico ensemble (BIS).
Hungarian Radio and foreign radio stations regularly broadcast his live or recorded European concerts and CD recordings.
As a soloist, he was a guest artist of the following major festivals: Dutch Festival, Festival van Vlaanderen, Musicora Paris, Avignon Festival, Stockholm Early Music Festival, Innsbrucker Festwochen der Alten Musik, Festival Radovljica, St. Petersburg Early Music Festival, etc. He made his debut in the USA (Chicago) with Quantz’s G-major Concerto QV 5: 174 and was invited to Boston to perform several times Bach’s Musicalisches Opfer, accompanied by US American artists. He has performed in Moscow almost every year since 2004. In The Hague and Leipzig, he performed the entire flute chamber music of C. Ph. E. Bach: 45 works in 8-8 concerts.
He most often performs in the company of a single keyboard player. He performed among others with harpsichordists Christine Shornsheim, Léon Berben, Shalev Ad-El, Miklós Spányi and Nicholas Parle. He also had iconic artists such as William Christie, Sigiswald Kuijken or Emma Kirkby as his partners. He gave a duo concert with Barthold Kuijken in Budapest.
He regularly gives lectures and workshops abroad and in Hungary topics like rhetoric, Proportionlehre, Figurenlehre, baroque repertoire of the flute, the flute works of C. Ph. E. Bach the flute sonatas of J. S. Bach, Handel's flute works, inégalité, improvisation, ornamentation.