Erste Young Diva: Anna Sőregi | Tara Khozein

In connection with the temporary Divas & Icons exhibition, the House of Music Hungary has partnered with Erste Bank to present their new Erste Young Diva programme in support of young talents. The six young artists participating in the program were selected from a number of musicians who had also previously appeared at the House of Music. Nearly six thousand people took part in the online voting. The prize of one million forints offered by Erste Bank went to Anna Sőregi, the Junior Príma Award-winning performer known for being the singer for Bajkó. In addition, the House of Music also awarded a professional special prize to singer Tara Khozein, who will also take the stage on the same evening as Sőregi.

Anna Sőregi Born in the Vojvodina region of Serbia, Junior Príma Award-winner Anna Sőregi graduated from the Liszt Academy with a degree in folk song and folk music theory in 2022. As the singer for the band Bajkó and a several-time guest of the ‘Fölszállott a pava’ folk music programme, she has popularised the combination of vocalist and recorder player. She has also released her first solo album, titled Széki versek (‘Poems from Szék’). For this concert, she has selected material from the repertoires of singers whose lives and skill she has found inspiring. These have yielded the pairing of free verse and melodies by the rural singers of the Maros-Küküllők region, the healing power of Gyimes laments, the vivacious energy of Vojvodina melodies, and the rich emotional world of the lyrics from Szék. The texts heard in the programme reveal how these village-dwelling peasants of the past conceived of beauty, which to them extended beyond physical attractiveness to convey the purity of the soul as well. These songs depict beauty, which is closely related to love, through symbols and similes of nature, the spiritual world, and moral values. The songs about love find beauty not only in the external sense, but also in the profundity of yearning and emotional attachment.

Bence Kálmán – violin
Előd Kónya – violin
Csaba Weingart – violas
Balázs Varga – cello, double bass
Zoltán Juhász – recorder

Tara Khozein
Singer Tara Khozein is a versatile figure on Budapest’s concert and theatre scene. Working across numerous genres, as a performer she is primarily interested in improvisation, combining classical singing with experimental techniques, as well as in physical theatre, while also serving as the music director for many theatrical productions. In recent years, she has appeared in Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass’s film Once Within a Time, as well as in several international contemporary opera productions (Samu Gryllus’s Geiseloper, Kate Soper’s Ipsa Dixit, and Ondřej Adámek’s Ines and Connection Impossible). During the 2023/24 season, she was an artistic directors of the Soharóza choir and regular contributor to bands such as Kat and the Devil (Albert Márkos, Oliver Mayne, Ernő Hock, Szilveszter Miklós), the Budapest Improvisers Orchestra and Ensemble Mobilé. In her 30-minute programme, Khozein shares her approach to the human voice, guiding the audience through the story of her arrival in Budapest with everything from traditional classical singing to the contemporary classical music of Georges Aperghis, her discovery of extended techniques, vocal improvisations, Persian poetry from the 13th and 14th centuries and her own fresh compositions. She plans to close her concert and lead into Anna Sőregi’s act with a new Hungarian-language piece that is connected to her identity as a Budapest artist.