Apolka Bonnyai

Apolka Bonnyai graduated as a pianist from the Franz Liszt Academy of Music as a student of Dénes Várjon,
Balázs Szokolay and András Kemenes in 2001. She obtained her DLA degree at the same institution in 2013. She participated in the master classes of Schiff András, Malcolm Bilson, Rados Ferenc, Pavel Gililov, Dmitrij
Bashkirov, Lev Natochenny, Leslie Howard és Norma Fisher .
She won several scholars hips and prizes at different international music competitions. As the winner of the Weingarten scholarship she studied at Birmingham Conservatoire in England in 1998 with the professor Malcolm Wilson. In 2005/2006 she obtained a Performer’s Certificate at Montclair State University in the USA under the Terplan Researcher’s Scholarship in the class of Prof. David Witten and Prof. Mark Pakman.
She won the II. Prize at the Salzburg Grand Prize Virtuoso International Chambermusic Competition in 2016, and the III. Prize at the Vienna Grand Prize Piano Virtuoso International Competition in 2017. Also, as prize winners at the Golden Classical Music Awards, she was invited to play at Carnegie Hall in New York in March 2019.

Beside the concerts outside of Hungary, she has been invited to several different European countries such as Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Germany, Sweden, England and has also performed in Japan and the United States.
As a soloist, she performed at the Yamaha Artist Liszt Festival in New York and at the Hungarian Festival of the Arts and Humanities in New York and in New Jersey, furthermore she played at the Kennedy Center in Wahington D.C. on the concert organised for the honour of Charles Simonyi.
She represented Hungary with great success at the 9th Kyoto Music Festival in Japan, which concert was also recorded on CD.
She is a regular performer at the Podium of Young Artists in the Marble Hall of the Hungarian Radio, where her concerts have also been recorded.
Since 2001 she has been working for St. Steven King Conservatoire as an artist teacher of piano as a main subject, regularly give masterclasses and is a jury member of competitions.

She is the artist director and pianist of the V4 International Piano Festival organised in Sárospatak, moreover she is also the artistic director as well as the festival director of the Carpathian Basin’s Classical Music Festival.