András Ligeti was born in 1953 in Pecs, Hungary and studied the violin in his home city. In 1970, became a student of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, graduating in 1977. He first began study in conducting at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in 1974 and graduated in 1979 as a student of Andras Korodi. Between 1977 and 1985 he was both concertmaster and conductor of the Hungarian State Opera.

Ligeti is a former member of the Eder String Quartet and concertmaster of the Budapest Chamber Orchestra. He has also taught the violin and the art of conducting at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music. In 1975 he won first prize at the Leo Weiner International Competition and in 1980 first prize at the Sonata Competition in Bloomington, USA. In 1980 he studied at the College of Music of Vienna in Karl Oesterreicher’s conductor group, as a Solti scholar.

András Ligeti became music director of the Matav Hungarian Symphony Orchestra. He has also worked with all the major orchestras in Hungary as well as the leading orchestras in Dresden, Sapporo, Nagoya, Dortmund, Stuttgart, Oslo, Bergen, Taipei, Madrid and Geneva. He has conducted the Festival Orchestra of Toronto, the Radio Orchestra of Berlin, the Berlin Symphony, the Nouvelle Orchestre de Paris, the BBC Orchestras including the BBC Philharmonic, the Webern Ensemble in Vienna, the Santa Cecilia of Rome, the Philharmonic of Seoul and the Japanese Chamber Orchestra. Since September 1997, he has given fifteen concerts a year as artistic director of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Dortmund. In December 1998 he premièred Bizet’s Carmen in the UK with Opera North and in February 1999 was invited to conduct The Damnation of Faust by Berlioz at the Festival of Perth.

András Ligeti’s work has been acknowledged by the Liszt and Bartók-Pastory prizes. On Naxos, Andreas Ligeti has worked with Jenő Jandó in producing volumes of the label’s well-known and critically acclaimed complete series of the Mozart piano concertos as well as concertos by Grieg, Brahms, Schumann, Mendelssohn (with Benjamin Frith), Liszt (with Joseph Banowetz), and Bartók. His recording of Liszt’s monumental Faust Symphony was also well-received by the critics.