Ilona Dobszay-Meskó is a conductor and a composer honoured with the Erkel Ferenc Award. Her oeuvre of original compositions includes orchestral works, concertos, oratorio and vocal-symphonic compositions, a ballet, three fairy-tale plays, compositions for mixed choir, women's choir, men's choir and children's choir, solo pieces, chamber music for instrumental and vocal ensembles, a melodramatic orchestral work, and a theatre play with music and poetry. Her grand oratorio Missa "Da Pacem” was written during the pandemic (2020-2022), thanks to a 3-year grant from the Hungarian Academy of Arts.
Her fairy-tale plays have reached tens of thousands of pre-school and school-aged children through more than 200 performances. Her works are performed regularly and with great pleasure by Hungarian symphony orchestras. She has represented Hungary with award-winning works in New York, Vancouver, and Rome; her pieces were also performed in Beijing, Japan, Germany, Israel, Sweden, and other countries. Her interests focus on musical theatre. She is currently working on her first opera.
As a guest conductor, she has been invited by the Kodály Philharmonia Debrecen, the Pannon Philharmonic Orchestra, the Danubia Orchestra, the Alba Regia Symphony Orchestra, the Gödöllő Symphony Orchestra, the Szeged Symphony Orchestra, the MÁV Symphony Orchestra, the Miskolc Symphony Orchestra, the Dohnányi Orchestra Budafok, and the Kecskemét Symphony Orchestra, among others. She is founder and leader of the orchestra Ventoscala Sinfonietta since its founding in 2003.
In the 2000s, she worked as a piano accompanist as well, and coached several opera performances along with world-famous artists at the Musical Stage Directing Programme of the University of Theatre and Film Arts, at the Department of Vocal and Opera Studies of the Academy of Music, and at the Montpellier Radio France Festival. In some opera performances she replaced the orchestra by playing the piano. She has conducted Donizetti's opera Rita, Rossini's opera L'italiana in Algeri, Zsófia Tallér's film opera Johanna, and László Vidovszky's opera Narcissus and Echo, which she also directed. She is still active as a pianist in various chamber music formations.
