THE CONDUCTOR
Mihály Zeke was born in London in 1982 into a Greek-Hungarian family of musicians and studied church music, piano, and conducting in Stuttgart. He received scholarships from the Kyveli Horn Foundation and the DAAD, and was a member of the German Music Council's Conductors' Forum between 2012 and 2015. Masterclasses with Graham Johnson, Anne Le Bozec, Michael Gläser, Stefan Parkman, Peter Dijkstra, Jörg-Peter Weigle, and Hans-Christoph Rademann, among others, complemented his training.From 2012 to 2015, he was choir director at the Opéra de Dijon and, at the same time, conducted the young German-French chamber choir Candides, which won first prize at the International Choir Competition in Neuchâtel (Switzerland) in 2014. He has made guest appearances as a choir director at the English National Opera and the Théâtre des Champs Elysées. In 2015, he took over the direction of the renowned French chamber choir Arsys, whose CD recording Naissance de Vénus (2018) with French a cappella works from Debussy to Messiaen received multiple awards.
Since 2020, he has been music director at the University of Stuttgart and has taught at the Stuttgart University of Music and Performing Arts since 2017. From 2018 to 2021, he was professor of choral and orchestral conducting at the Protestant University of Church Music in Tübingen. In the winter semester of 2023/24, he took over the professorship for choral conducting at the Hochschule für Musik Mainz.
Mihály Zeke is a guest conductor with radio choirs in Hungary, Greece, and Germany, as well as with the Rhineland-Palatinate State Youth Choir. He is also a jury member at international competitions (e.g., Florilège Vocal de Tours) and regularly conducts conducting courses in France and Germany. In addition, he cultivates his passion for song accompaniment, which has also been recognized in international competitions in the past.