pianists-from-hungary

"This Hungarian Van Cliburn impressed me from the outset with a deep and confident involvement in the music, a capacity for both power and delicacy, and a preference for passion over absolute accuracy."

"With his masterclass on piano playing, László Gyimesi helps to preserve the great romantic tradition of piano playing. A relaxed piano technique without unnecessary tensions allows us to express our thoughts and feelings almost directly. Every pianist can come closer to this ideal. His masterclass is extremely valuable in that respect – it can unleash great potential in every pianist."

"He was an indefatigable worker at his technical studies and his editions of piano compositions, even during the heated months of the year."

"There are probably few modern pianists who have gone into the matter of fingering with such minute detail as Joseffy. With him fingering was almost an art in itself. At the lessons, in his books of technical studies, and in his editions of pianoforte works this matter was always uppermost in his mind. Fingering and tone quality he considered inseparable, the latter depending almost entirely on the former."

"At his own lessons Joseffy was a great source of inspiration to his pupils. When he felt that he had a responsive intellect at his side, he spared himself no pains in the careful elucidation of his points. His ideas on fingering were illuminating and his methods of practise for overcoming specific technical difficulties in the study matter were quite invaluable. Although he laid great stress on matters of technical detail, he was not to be dazzled by a merely technically brilliant performance. When a new pupil came to him and tried to make an impression with some showy composition he would ask for a Bach Prelude or a Mendelssohn Song without Words. "You may be able to play that technically difficult composition," he would say, "and still not be able to play the piano. From a Bach Prelude or a Mendelssohn Song without Words I can tell right away just how much of a musician you are." Pupils who at the first interview tried to foist upon him an unripe performance of such works as the Appassionata or the E minor Concerto of Chopin as samples of their pianistic prowess did not usually succeed in earning anything better than his deep disgust."

"He emphasized most strongly the importance of combining technical practise with the study of pieces, his idea being to take the most difficult passages and construct even more difficult technical studies from them."

"He must be familiar with the entire pianoforte literature, must be able to illustrate at the second piano everything that he teaches, and must possess such a highly developed analytical faculty that he is able to recognize and impart the all-important "how" in distinction from the "what." The mere playing of a piece at the second piano with the remark, "I do it this way," he considered of little help to the pupil, unless the very necessary explanation of the process were also forthcoming."

"Of the grace and finesse of Joseffy's Chopin, the clarity of his Bach, the depth of his Brahms and Beethoven, of the wide catholicity of his taste, resulting in interpretations of Mozart and Liszt, of Schubert and Tschaikowsky that were equally true in conception and beautiful in execution, of all this alone a little volume might be written."

"Joseffy's own playing underwent a marked change during the years following his coming to America. Those who heard him in the earlier part of his career describe the dainty elegance of his performances, the wonderful grace and the unequalled technical perfection of his style. They gained for him the sobriquet of the "Patti of the piano.""

"I think Michelangeli in some repertory is absolutely incredible, especially Debussy. One special favorite of mine is Géza Anda who I think is such an underrated pianist and a great musician. A lot of young people don’t know him. There was such a natural way of making music in what he does. He was spontaneous, so alive, totally without makeup, and so honest. Without being shy, he takes risks. His playing is a wonderful combination of intellect and intuition. And, of course, I adore Lipatti, the best of Schnabel, and Horowitz at his best. He orchestrated at the piano."

"The magic of Anda's piano playing lies primarily in his extraordinary culture of touch. There are just a very few piano sounds in the world just as beautiful. [...] When he plays passages, and even longer, tied scale-like melodies across the whole keyboard, the tone color changes like alternating human voices: the alto becomes tenor, the tenor darkens to bass. And then there are those special, hardly pressed, almost just palpated middle voices running and gliding through in the Schumann work, that conjures almost a hoffmannian atmosphere around Anda's performance. Is it still the technique, a question of touch only? By no means. We have been talking about the music for a long time […]"

"Composer, teacher, Abbé, Casanova, writer, sage, pioneer and champion of new music, philanthropist, philosopher and one of the greatest pianists in history, Franz Liszt was the very embodiment of the Romantic spirit. He worked in every field of music except ballet and opera and to each field he contributed a significant development."

"Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his."

"Sorrowful and great is the artist's destiny."

"Wasting time is one of the worst faults of the world. Life is so short, every moment is so precious and yet, we live as if life will never end."

"When you write the story of two happy lovers, place them on the shores of Lake Como. I do not know a district more manifestly blessed by heaven; I've never seen another where the charms of a life of love would seem more natural [...] and start it with these words: "On the shores of Lake Como.""

"I carry a deep sadness of the heart which must now and then break out in sound."

"His playing was free, poetic, replete with imaginative shadings, and, at the same time, characterized by noble, artistic repose. And his technique, his virtuosity? I hesitate to speak if it. It suffices to observe that he has not lost it but has rather added to it in clarity and moderation. What a remarkable man! After a life incomparably rich and active, full of excitement, passion, and pleasure, he returns at the age of sixty-two and plays the most difficult music with the ease and strength and freshness of a youth…."

"Perhaps the greatest source of wonder in Liszt's life was that he composed anything at all, let alone anything of lasting greatness. The man who, from an early age, had crisscrossed Europe as the greatest travelling virtuoso, providing, with the onset of puberty, much material for gossip columns, might have been forgiven for taking the Wildean view, 'My art is my life', and leaving it at that. [...] Exactly how Liszt could have found the time to compose is difficult to imagine."

"Our peasant music, naturally, is invariably tonal, if not always in the sense that the inflexible major and minor system is tonal. (An "atonal" folk-music, in my opinion, is unthinkable.) Since we depend upon a tonal basis of this kind in our creative work, it is quite self-evident that our works are quite pronouncedly tonal in type. I must admit, however, that there was a time when I thought I was approaching a species of twelve-tone music. Yet even in works of that period the absolute tonal foundation is unmistakable."

"By the time of his Fourth String Quartet, inversional symmetry had become as fundamental a premise of Bartók's harmonic language as it is of the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Neither he nor they ever realized that this connection establishes a profound affinity between them in spite of the stylistic features that so obviously distinguish his music from theirs … Nowhere does he recognize the communality of his harmonic language with that of the twelve-tone composers that is implied in their shared premise of the harmonic equivalence of inversionally symmetrical pitch-class relations."

"Competitions are for horses, not artists."

"In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution."