László Kovács earned his degree in conducting and trombone from Budapest's Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music, and then continued his studies with Yuri Simonov, at Moscow's Tchaikovsky Conservatory and at the Bolshoi Theatre. He made his conducting debut at age 22 with the Hungarian State Opera, of which he has been a member since 1984. Between 1981 and 2007 he was a professor at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music, and between 1984 and 2014 the artistic director and music director of the Hungarian Symphony Orchestra, Miskolc. He has served on the juries of several prestigious international conducting competitions, and has made four opera films produced by Hungarian Television. Since 2001, he has held master classes on two occasions at the conducting department of the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMD). Since 1998, he has been the regular accompanist at Éva Marton's song and aria concerts, and has also appeared as a piano soloist with the Budapest Festival Orchestra and the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, among others. A conductor with the Hungarian Radio Symphonic Orchestra from 1998, he went on to serve as its principal conductor between 2004 and 2008 before becoming director of Eötvös Loránd University's Art Ensemble in 2009. He has made more than 50 CDs and several hundred radio recordings, and conducts 70-80 concerts annually, having performed in 21 European countries, as well as in Asia, North America and the Middle East. In 1985 he won the János Ferencsik Commemorative Award founded by Antal Doráti and spent a month in London at the invitation of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He has won 12 distinctions for performing contemporary works, as well as the Liszt Award (1989), the Bartók-Pásztory Award (1993), the Pro Urbe Miskolc award (1996), Hungarian Radio's eMeRTon Award for the best new production of the year (1998), the Miskolc's Muse Award (2004), as well as being named an Artist of Merit by the Republic of Hungary (2007) and winning the Pro Urbe Kunszentmárton award (2013) and the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary (2013).
