In 1975 he won First Prize at the Leo Weiner International Competition and in 1980 First Prize at the Sonata Competition in Bloomington USA. In 1980 he studied at the College of Music of Vienna in Karl Oesterreicher's conductor group, as a Solti scholar.

Andras Ligeti is presently Music Director of the Matav Hungarian Symphony Orchestra. He has also worked with all the major orchestras in Hungary as well as the leading orchestras in Dresden, Sapporo, Nagoya, Dortmund, Stuttgart, Oslo, Bergen, Taipei, Madrid and Geneva. He has conducted the Festival Orchestra of Toronto, the Radio Orchestra of Berlin, the Berlin Symphony, the Nouvelle Orchestre de Paris, the BBC Orchestras including the BBC Philharmonic, the Webern Ensemble in Vienna, the Santa Cecilia of Rome, the Philharmonic of Seoul and the Japanese Chamber Orchestra. Since September 1997, he has given fifteen concerts a year as Artistic Director of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Dortmund. In December 1998 he premiered Bizet's Carmen in the UK with Opera North and in February 1999 was invited to conduct The Damnation of Faust by Berlioz at the Festival of Perth.

Andreas Ligeti's work has been acknowledged by the Liszt and Bartók-Pastory prizes. On Naxos, Andreas Ligeti has worked with Jeno Jandó in producing volumes of the label's well-known and critically acclaimed complete series of the Mozart piano concertos as well as concertos by Grieg, Brahms, Schumann, Mendelssohn (with Benjamin Frith), Liszt (with Joseph Banowetz), and Bartok. His recording of Liszt's monumental Faust Symphony was also well received by the critics.

August, 2001

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