Bárdos, Lajos
Lajos Bárdos was a composer, musicologist, teacher and conductor of considerable impact on Hungarian musical life. He laid, together with Kodály, the foundations of 20th-century Hungarian choral music-making.
Through his work as a conductor he raised the standards of Hungarian choral singing to an international level within a few decades. His purposefulness, vitality and interpretative powers won him considerable acclaim. His compositions, too, were directed towards cultivating Hungarian choral life: they draw on Renaissance polyphony and Hungarian folk music, following in the tradition of Bartók and Kodály. His works, which are models of choral writing, deal sensitively with Hungarian prosody and radiate an inner harmony and vigour. His musicological activity began to develop in the 1950s. He had a gift for systematization, which he applied to major studies of Gregorian melody, modal and Romantic harmony, and the analysis of works by Liszt, Bartók and Kodály.
His prizes and awards:
Erkel Prize (1953); Artist of Merit (1954); Kossuth Prize (1955); Outstanding Artist (1970); Order of the Banner (1979); Order of the Banner with Laurels (1984); Bartók-Pásztory Award (1984).