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Ella Nagy
Piano Irish/Hungarian Age: 26 J. S. Bach Nikolai Kapustin F. Liszt |
Ella Nagy is the first instrumental recipient of the Blackwater Valley Opera Festival RIAM John Pollard Bursary and winner of various competitions in Ireland, such as the RIAM’s Maura Dowdall Concerto Competition in 2019, the RIAM’s Chamber Fest Dublin Prize in 2023 and various Feis Ceoil competitions.
Ella has performed in most of Ireland’s concert venues, most notably, in the National Concert Hall where she received a standing ovation for her performance of Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. Internationally, she has given recitals in the UK, Portugal, Hungary and in New York and Florida. Ella’s performances have been broadcast on RTÉ Lyric FM, Dublin South FM and BBC Radio Ulster. In 2023 Ella recorded both solo and chamber works by Irish composer Jonathan Nangle to feature on his latest album called ‘Surface Patterns ‘. She is fascinated by the connection between Baroque and Contemporary music and for this reason, she studied many of Domenico Scarlatti ‘s sonatas on the harpsichord while simultaneously studying all of Nikolai Kapustin’s Op. 40 Concert Etudes on the piano. Ella is a keen chamber musician and thoroughly enjoys collaborating with both singers and instrumentalists. |
| Programme Notes
I decided to include works from various styles, starting with a Romantic take on J. S. Bach’s E Minor Prelude, which Siloti arranged in the deeper key of B minor. The first half of the piece focuses on the right-hand semiquaver melody line which is then generously contrasted in the second half of the work by shining a light on the melody of the left hand, which was there all along, but it is now lifted out and the right-hand figuration has retreated into the background. Kapustin’s ‘Reminiscence’ Concert Etude presents demisemiquaver running passages in one hand and chordal melodic accompaniment in the other, a texture that changes in the middle of the piece, where the roles of the hands are reversed. This is a dreamy work with brilliant and innovational use of jazz chords and progressions. The final piece in my programme is Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody which is a work I feel deeply connected to. It conveys two main emotions since the piece is in the form of a “czárdás”, a Hungarian dance, a slow and theatrically melancholic first half and a vivacious second half that starts out with the tinkling imitation of the dulcimer. |
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