Augustin Szokos is a Hungarian conductor and harpsichordist specialising in historically informed performance practice. As founder and artistic director of the Budapest Bach Consort (est. 2009), he has developed a distinct artistic profile rooted in 17th–18th-century repertoire, combining scholarly insight with vivid, rhetorically shaped interpretation. A graduate of the Liszt Academy in Budapest, where he earned degrees in orchestral conducting and harpsichord performance, Szokos has been active for over a decade as continuo player (harpsichord, organ, fortepiano) as well as conductor and artistic leader, appearing in numerous concerts and recordings in Hungary and abroad.
As a continuo player he has performed with virtually all leading Hungarian period ensembles including Orfeo Orchestra, Capella Savaria, Savaria Baroque Orchestra, Aura Musicale and Concerto Armonico, and has also collaborated with modern symphonic ensembles such as the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra, Concerto Budapest and the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. He has worked alongside distinguished conductors and concertmasters including Kati Debretzeni, Julien Chauvin, Simon Standage, Benjamin Bayl, Marcus Creed, Bart Van Reyn, Helmuth Rilling, Howard Williams and György Vashegyi.
As a conductor he has collaborated on multiple occasions with Hungary’s leading period ensembles, such as the Orfeo Orchestra, the Purcell Choir and Capella Savaria. With the Budapest Bach Consort he has directed staged Baroque productions with historically informed gestures and dramaturgy, including Handel’s Il delirio amoroso (2024), Apollo e Dafne (2024, 2025) and Acis and Galatea (2025), realised in collaboration with stage directors such as Sigrid T’Hooft and Niels Badenhop.
A sustained engagement with original sources forms an essential part of his artistic process. Since 2015 he has prepared more than 130 urtext editions from original manuscripts and prints. His research has included the Hungarian translation of the complete theoretical writings of Francesco Geminiani, a project accompanied by a complete cycle of performances of Geminiani’s works for violin and basso continuo, given with violinist László Paulik on original eighteenth-century instruments. He has also been invited to teach basso continuo and composition at the Early Music Days festival, organised by Filharmónia Hungary (2023, 2024, 2026).
Alongside his work as a performer, Szokos is also active as a composer, engaging directly with eighteenth-century musical language. For him, composition is inseparable from performance practice, serving as a means of entering the style and exploring its proportions, gestures, and aesthetic principles through the act of creation. Rather than treating historically informed performance as a stylistic layer, he understands it as a way of thinking – an approach attentive to the music’s original impact and to its resonance with listeners today.
He makes his Hungarian State Opera debut in the 2026/27 season, with the production of Best of Händel / Dido and Aeneas.