Heltay prepared them for the festival choral events and for concerts and recordings under a galaxy of conductors including Yehudi Menuhin, Leonard Bernstein and André Previn, as well as his fellow Hungarians Antal Dorati and István Kertész. In 1988 a performance of Britten’s War Requiem in Flanders marked the 70th anniversary of the end of the First World War. From 1968 until the mid-1980s he was Director of Music at the Gardner Arts Centre (now the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts), where he trained the University of Sussex Choir and Orchestra. In 1974, Neville Marriner encouraged Heltay to form the Chorus of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, composed of straight, accurate voices and designed to match the instrumental sound of the by then world-famous orchestra. The choir made its debut in 1975 in Düsseldorf and was soon an established feature of the orchestra’s programming. Heltay's choral and Marriner’s instrumental styles matched perfectly, and the partnership of 25 years took Heltay and the Chorus through numerous concerts, tours and 28 recordings from the major choral repertoire with soloists such as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Janet Baker, Kiri Te Kanawa and Anthony Rolfe Johnson. Performances with Heltay as chorus master included the 250th-anniversary of Handel’s Messiah in Dublin in 1992 and the closing concerts of the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. and their recordings also include the soundtrack for Amadeus in 1984, and the UEFA Champions League Anthem. From 1985 to 1995, Heltay was the Royal Choral Society's Director of Music. As well as the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Heltay worked as a conductor with the Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Dresden Philharmonic, Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra and he conducted numerous radio orchestras and choirs including those of Brussels, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Madrid, Budapest and Stockholm. In the 1990s, Heltay moved to Barcelona, where he served as director of the Spanish Radio and Television Choir from 1997 and continued a busy schedule of conducting and master classes for young choral conductors in Europe and the USA. Heltay was awarded the International Kodály Medal in 1982, became an honorary Doctor of Music at Sussex in 1995 and was elected an honorary Fellow of Merton College in 1997. After retiring, Heltay returned to Budapest in his eighties. Personal life Heltay became a British citizen in 1957. In Britain, he married Hilary Nicholson in