Rudolf Szitka

Clarinetist Rudolf Szitka graduated from the Liszt Academy in 1997 from the class of Béla Kovács and Zsolt Szatmári. In 1994, he was runner-up at the Vienna-Prague-Budapest Chamber Music Competition, and that same year won third prize at the International Chamber Music Competition in Trapani (Sicily). In 1996, he won first prize at the International Chamber Music Competition in Paris as a member of the Concordia Wind Quintet. That same year, he also won the Competition of Young Clarinetists in Paris, organised by the ICA. Between 1993 and 2011, he was a member of the Orchestra of the Hungarian State Opera, while between 1999 and 2000, he was the principal clarinetist of the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester. Since 1997, he’s been teaching clarinet at the Béla Bartók Music Institute at the University of Miskolc, where he has now also become an associate professor and the head of the Wind Department. He won the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s Sándor Végh competition in 2009 and 2017. In 2010, he was a soloist in the BFO’s Haydn-Mozart Plus series conducted by Leonidas Kavakos. During the BFO’s 2011 Schubert Marathon, he performed as a soloist to the MÁV Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gábor Takács-Nagy. In 2013, he received his PhD from the Liszt Academy.