Maria Kelemen

Maria Kelemen (also Mária Kelemen; born 17 October 1938) is a Hungarian-born violinist, viola player and music educator based in Dublin, Ireland. A representative of the Hungarian school of violin playing, she trained under André Gertler at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels before embarking on a two-decade career as principal violist of the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and founding member of the Amsterdam Kern Ensemble. She is best known as the founder and director of the Young European Strings School of Music (YES) in Dublin, which she established in 1988. In 2005, she received the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of Hungary.

Early life Kelemen was born on 17 October 1938 in Budapest into a Jewish family. Her mother, Klára Juhász (1904–1998), and her maternal grandmother, the pianist Emilia Schoffan, were both professional musicians and educators. Around 1909, Schoffan founded the first private music school in Budapest, situated in the heart of the Pest side of the city, with solfège training as an obligatory component for all instrumentalists. The school was subsequently directed by Klára Juhász, and held the distinction of remaining the only private educational institution in Budapest that avoided nationalisation during the communist period following the Second World War.

Kelemen's father, Dr Károly Kelemen, was taken from the family home by the Nyilasok (Hungarian Arrow Cross) in 1942 and sent to a forced labour camp in Balf, Hungary, where he was shot shortly before the Red Army liberated the country in March 1945. Klára Juhász survived the war after being intercepted by Raoul Wallenberg while boarding a train to Auschwitz; Wallenberg provided her with a Swedish "protective passport" modelled on Red Cross documents. During the final months of the war, Kelemen was separated from her mother and grandmother and contracted paratyphus while alone in a cellar in Budapest, but survived.

Education in Belgium After six months in a refugee camp in Vienna, Kelemen was awarded a Ford Scholarship to study violin in the class of André Gertler at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. Gertler, one of the principal heirs to the Hungarian School tradition as a pupil of Jenő Hubay, became a formative influence on her approach to both performance and pedagogy.

Career

Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra Kelemen began her professional career at the age of twenty as co-leader of the viola section of what was then the Kunstmaand Orchestra in Amsterdam, an ensemble subsequently renamed the Amsterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and today known as the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra.

Amsterdam Kern Ensemble In 1966, Kelemen and Masin co-founded the Amsterdam Kern Ensemble, a piano quartet comprising Masin (violin), Kelemen (viola), Bob Reuling (cello) and Rinus Groot (piano). Kelemen has also contributed as a regular author on string pedagogy to international professional journals. Before a child produces a note on an instrument, they are trained to mentally conceptualise and hear the precise pitch, achieved through rigorous vocalization, singing games, hand-sign work and stick notation. Kelemen has observed that adult conceptual language often hinders a toddler's kinesthetic progress and accordingly structures instruction around physical game-based activities designed to build upper-body strength, bilateral coordination and postural alignment as prerequisites for holding and playing an instrument. She places emphasis instead on the student's active critical evaluation of their own sound, drawing on the solfège tradition established by her grandmother Emilia Schoffan at the Juhász Zeneiskola in Budapest at the beginning of the twentieth century.