ZOOM Exhibition
Dániel Vass: Glances – conductors and soloists
Kerengő Gallery, November 2008

The autographed portraits of Shlomo Mintz, Sir Neville Marriner, Tabea Zimmermann, Tamás Vásáry, Uto Ughi, Zoltán Kocsis, Peter Maag, Sergio Azzolini, Gennadij Rozhdestvensky, Gidon Kremer, Marc-André Hamelin, Maria Joao Pires, Alain Lombard, Aldo Ciccolini, Dezső Ránki, Dimitri Kitajenko, Shelley Julian Rachlin, Lawrence Foster, Lazar Berman, Boris Belkin and other world-famous conductors and soloists enchant us at the 64th exhibition of Kerengő Gallery. Who was the photographer that conjured up these fantastic faces for us?
Dániel Vass. He was born in 1953 to a family of artists in Budapest. From an early age he made promising paintings and drawings and won a number of awards. However, after attending Hunyadi János Music Primary School, he continued his studies in the Bartók Béla Music Grammar School specialising in the clarinet, and after receiving his college degree in 1974, he went to Switzerland. He received another degree in Zurich in 1976 and joined the orchestra in Lugano (today: Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana).

It has been one and a half decades since he chose the camera instead of the brush and pencil that he so gladly wielded earlier. He has introduced his graphically recorded landscapes at a number of exhibitions, but his real field has become the portrait photos of orchestral musicians. The archive of the orchestra has been on the increase for fifteen years now: about 150 enlargements, which the conductors and soloists dedicated to the company, largely in their mother tongues.

János Eifert