Kálmán Strausz pursued his musical studies in Gyula, Esztergom, and at the Liszt FerencAcademy of Music in Budapest, as a student of Zoltán Vásárhelyi and István Párkai. From 1974, he worked as an editor at Hungarian Radio, then from 1977, he served as the conductor of the Budapest Youth Chorus and as the head of the classical music department of the Hungarian Television. From 1984 to 1991, he was the artistic director of the Kodály Choir Debrecen, and in 1988, he founded the Budapest International Choir Competition. Between 1992 and 2008, he led the Hungarian Radio Choir, and in 2010 he became the conductor of the Honvéd Male Choir. From 2014 to 2017, he was the chorus director of the Hungarian State Opera.
In 1996, he founded the Budapest Studio Choir. Under his direction, the choir participated in high-quality productions in the Hungarian State Opera, the Erkel Theatre, the Palace of Arts, and the National Theatre in the following years. The world premiere of Liszt’s oratorio fragment Saint Stanislaus and the premieres of numerous contemporary Hungarian works are associated with his name. Through his initiative, Levente Gyöngyösi, Miklós Csemiczky, György Orbán, György Selmeczi and János Vajda composed cantatas for the 100th anniversary of the First World War; he presented these works in several concerts and also produced a concert film titled When I Set Out Toward Galicia. At his request, Péter Tóth composed the cantata Infernal Divine for the Dante jubilee year, which was premiered at the Strausz70 concert. Both audio and video recordings were made of this performance.
With his choirs he won numerous first prizes and outstanding rankings at competitions, and produced albums as well as television and radio recordings. As a guest conductor, he has appeared in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, Israel, Japan, and the United States, and he has also worked at the Salzburg Festival. He has collaborated with world-renowned conductors and ensembles such as the Berlin Philharmonic, Sir Georg Solti, Beethovenfest Bonn, the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, Christoph von Eschenbach, Marcello Viotti and Lorin Maazel. In 1999, he worked at the Megaron in Athens and at the Liceu in Barcelona, which present some of the world’s most prestigious opera productions featuring international stars. In March 2000, he gave a highly successful concert in Madrid with the Spanish National Radio Choir, which led to further invitations in Spain. He teaches masterclasses in Italy, Germany and the United States, and is a permanent member of the juries of numerous international choral competitions throughout Europe. For his achievements, he received the Liszt Prize in 1997 and the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary in 2010. In 1998, he was nominated for the Grammy Award in two categories.
