Márton Illés is a Hungarian composer, pianist, and conductor. He was born in Budapest on December 12, 1975. From 1981, he studied piano, percussion, and composition at music schools in Győr. In 1993, he spent a semester studying piano at the Zurich Conservatory, then graduated from the Basel Academy of Music in 1998, where he studied piano with László Gyimesi. From 2000, he pursued postgraduate piano studies in Hannover with Karl-Heinz Kämmerling.
Illés studied composition with Detlev Müller-Siemens in Basel from 1997 to 2001 and with Wolfgang Rihm in Karlsruhe from 2001 to 2005. In Karlsruhe, he also studied music theory with Michael Reudenbach and electroacoustic composition with Thomas Troge. His piano and composition training included master classes with György Sándor, Lazar Berman, György Ligeti, György Kurtág, and Helmut Lachenmann.
During the 1990s, Illés performed in solo and chamber concerts and played with the Basel Symphony Orchestra. He taught at the University of Music in Karlsruhe from 2005 and at the University of Music in Würzburg from 2011. In 2006, he founded the chamber ensemble Scene Polidimensionali, in which he performs as pianist and conductor. He has worked with Ensemble Modern, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Minguet Quartet, and the Munich Chamber Orchestra.
His works have been performed in Europe, Egypt, Brazil, and Greenland. In 2004, his chamber work Levels b was first performed in Frankfurt at an international workshop for contemporary ensembles led by Helmut Lachenmann and Frank Ollu. That year, his chamber oratorio Li kulli Schäi’n, based on an Andalusian Arabic elegy, was staged at the Cairo Opera House and the Liederhalle in Stuttgart; Wolfgang Rihm also presented it at an event at the Free Academy of Arts in Hamburg. His other works include the music-theater pieces Emily Dickinson’s Clock (2007) and The White Princess (2010), the orchestral work Post Torso (2007), and the piano concerto Drawings II, premiered in Cologne in 2011 with Illés as soloist and the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jonathan Nott.
Illés received the Christoph and Stefan Kaske Foundation Award in 2005, the Hindemith Prize and the Ernst von Siemens Composer Prize in 2008, and the Schneider-Schott Music Prize in 2008. He held fellowships at the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome in 2009, Villa Concordia in Bamberg in 2011, and the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria in 2012.