Georges Cziffra Festival
Budapest, Hungary Artistic director: JÁNOS BALÁZS Kossuth Prize winner pianist, Young Steinway Artist
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I only ever felt truly alive and free when passing from darkness to light or on taking flight from a dingy prison cell like a firebird. GEORGES CZIFFRA
WELCOME Ladies and Gentlemen, Everybody needs heroes, children and adults alike – after all, we all want to do good, to help or to create something long-lasting for our successors to build upon. The hero possesses something of the treasure we all seek. The fact that he shares his values with his fellow human beings instead of saving it all for himself bespeaks his greatness. My hero is Georges Cziffra. He shines above my life and career like a guiding star. His spiritual legacy, his astounding musical talent, his integrity and his selfless desire to help young musicians made him a legend in his lifetime. The Georges Cziffra Festival aims to continue all that Cziffra created and dreamed of in France: a series of concerts, master classes, musical competition and an opportunity for young performers to make themselves known to the audience. JÁNOS BALÁZS Pianist, winner of the Kossuth Prize, Young Steinway Artist artistic director of the Georges Cziffra Festival
GEORGES CZIFFRA Budapest, 5 November 1921 – Longpont-sur-Orge, 15 January 1994 World-renowned Hungarian-born pianist and virtuoso Georges Cziffra was born into a family of Gypsy musicians. His father, Georges Cziffra Snr., played the cimbalom. He started studying at the Liszt Academy at the age of eight, where his teachers included Ernő Dohnányi, Leó Weiner, Georges Ferenczy and Imre Keéri-Szántó. The young pianist attained a string of successes. In 1943 he was called up and ordered to the front and in 1950 he was imprisoned for attempting to defect. In the wake of the 1956 Uprising he settled in Paris where he became the master of Romantic piano literature (Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninov). His improvisational skills lifted him into the pantheon of the greatest pianists. Georges Cziffra’s wonderful and unique career, his knowledge, personality and tireless work for young people remain an example to this day. Prizes 1956 Liszt Prize 1986 Honorary citizen of Kőszeg 1993 Officer Grade of the Légion d’honneur 1993 Honourable Order of the Cross of the Republic of Hungary
GEORGES CZIFFRA FESTIVAL The Georges Cziffra Festival was founded by János Balázs, Kossuth Prize winner, Young Steinway Artist piano artist in Budapest, in 2016, with the intention to commemorate the Hungarian pianist of extraordinary talent. The main idea was to organize a series of classical music concerts that carry on the romantic musical spirit that the master represented. In addition to classical performances, the programme also offers jazz and improvisational concerts, applied art exhibitions and the famous Hungarian Gypsy music played in cafés. After the first year, the Hungarian Festival Association selected the Georges Cziffra Festival to be one of Hungary’s premium festivals. Furthermore, a posthumous Hungarian Heritage Award has been given to Georges Cziffra for the achievements of the Festival. Year by year, thousands of people buy tickets to the events, and the Cziffra Festival has become one of the most popular and most prominent event series. The programmes are hosted every year by the Budapest Liszt Academy, the MOM Cultural Centre, the Palace of Arts and other venues. Over the recent years, the festival has been made even more colourful with master training (piano, violin, singing) and scientific lectures in addition to the concerts. The festival has also decided to offer awards to support young talents starting their career as well as to recognize - both morally and financially - human achievements producing the highest cultural values. Despite its young age, the festival has featured guest artists like Evgeny Kissin, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Mischa Maisky, Vadim Repin, Arcadi Volodos, José Cura and Tamás Vásáry. Classical music, jazz, improvisation, Gypsy music, art exhibitions, education, scientific lectures, awards
Magical personality Interview with TAMÁS VÁSÁRY Cziffra Experiences III (Fidelio, 6 February 2016) GÁBOR MESTERHÁZI
– How did you come into contact with Georges Cziffra? – During the 1950s, when my parents were resettled, I developed a close friendship with Illés Ravasz, who worked at the Muzsika Hangverseny Company (predecessor of the Filharmónia). He tried to defect but was caught and spent two years in Sopronkőhid prison along with Georges Cziffra. Later we went to concerts together and heard the first solo recital by Emil Gilels in Hungary. I was overwhelmed by his technique. Ravasz had this to say: I know someone whose technique is even better than Gilels – his name is Gyuri Cziffra, and if you want to hear him let’s go to the Kedves. Cziffra played there, earning his keep in nightclubs. While seated in the dining room I heard that there were two fantastic pianists playing arrangements for four hands and I asked: who’s the other one? It turned out there wasn’t anyone else… Cziffra produced an incredible orgy of sound from the piano. He greeted Illés warmly and from then on we regularly went there to hear him play – I’ve never heard the like since. How he improvised – he would ask somebody to give him a theme, opera aria, hit tune and he would improvise on it, to the required length. He played so fast that I couldn’t figure out what he was doing. But it was not only fast but superb music. Incredible tone, there was electricity in the play, sparking with chord changes and ideas. A friendship developed between us. He wanted
me to teach his 11-year-old son to play the piano but I had to earn a living because I was attending the academy. I was forced to accept anything and everything. For instance, I had to learn Liszt’s Piano Concerto in E-flat major with the Szeged Symphony Orchestra in just two weeks, another time I had to accompany a long-in-the-tooth dancer-comedian, or I did whatever else came my way. I just didn’t have the time to go out to Szentendre to teach. One night Cziffra came to see me. I was suitably prepared: a bottle of whisky, one of vodka; I didn’t drink but when Gyuri stopped playing at dawn, they were empty... He was so tipsy by that time that I recognized what and how he was playing, but before that I couldn’t... I learned a thing or two from him but basically it was the inspiration that was fascinating. - At that time you were also good friends with Annie Fischer. What is the truth about the antagonism between Georges Cziffra and Annie Fischer? - These two relationships made it a precious period in my life. They represented two different trends. Only later was there slander about them feuding. Annie would never have wanted to hurt him and I cannot imagine this of Gyuri. Annie acknowledged Cziffra’s fantastic capabilities but she felt the Chopin etudes were too fast, he was concentrating on the technique – she brought out the poetic quality from these pieces. In this respect, I tended to agree with Annie Fischer.
Tamas Vásáry Kossuth Prize-winning pianist
- How did your friendship develop after the Uprising? - In November 1956 I also left Hungary, my father was imprisoned and I wanted to save him. I won a prize at the Brussels competition in June and with my parents we emigrated there. Not long after this I received a contract from Deutsche Grammophon for a Liszt recording, so I travelled to Paris for sheet music and visited Cziffra. Cziffra didn’t receive me very warmly; initially, when I phoned I was told he was not even at home. He said that anyone who was a friend of his enemy was no friend of his. I told him this was stupidity. I refuted all the gossip concerning Annie Fischer and we became good friends once again. When I could I attended his concerts and we spoke. I saw his dummy piano that he practised on when travelling (Liszt did this as well). I remember once when he played Liszt’s E-flat major piano concerto and Grieg’s A minor piano concerto in the Beaux Arts in Brussels. In her final years Annie Fischer told me she had heard Cziffra’s albums and she liked them a lot, because what she didn’t like in today’s pianists – metric, automatic playing – was totally absent in Gyuri. He dared to play freely. I last heard Cziffra when he played at the Spring Festival in 1981. At that time I hadn’t played on stage here, I was just a guest. Two weeks before he had lost his son, who dropped his cigarette on a highly flammable carpet. He was the
apple of their eye. Gyuri gave concerts so that if his son was invited to conduct, he played for half the rate. Before this concert he told the audience that he knew how important this festival was and this was the only reason he was on stage despite the terrible tragedy, but he excused himself beforehand if he became indisposed, despite which it was a marvellous concert. - Is there a side to Cziffra that we don’t know? - I heard slow pieces, classics from him. I always liked those. Improvisations, arrangements: simply fantastic. His Chopin and Liszt were amazing, nobody ever played Schubert’s Moments Musicaux in F minor with such deep sorrow, with such conviction, and I have heard his beautiful Beethoven ‘Pathétique’ sonata. I think he should have recorded more classical works, but his record company considered that they could get the most out of him in the shortest time by concentrating on the virtuoso repertoire. He was among the first in Hungary to learn Bartók’s second piano concerto; he had a fantastic memory... It was not so much his speed in playing as the electricity behind it, the personality that was magical. He has had a huge influence both on audiences and his fellow musicians. Added to which, he was a very nice man. Modest, although he knew precisely who he was. I cannot imagine that he would have hurt anybody. He helped young people at his festival in Senlis. I feel privileged to have known him personally.
I heard that there were two fantastic pianists playing arrangements for four hands and I asked: who’s the other one? It turned out there wasn’t anyone else…
COLUMBIA ARTISTS MANAGEMENT INC. ABOUT GEORGES CZIFFRA 1957-58
Orpheus in the Underworld FERENC LÁSZLÓ | Georges CZIFFRA AND PIANO BAR PLAYING
20th century history stole a decade and a half from the artistic career and life of Cziffra Georges. On the one hand, in a way that it forced the musician-turned-soldier, then prisoner, away from his instrument, and on the other hand it truly chained him to the pianos of the most diverse collection of bars, locales and nightclubs in Budapest. What was a priceless gift to the bohemian figures of Pest nightlife in the 1940s and 1950s was to Cziffra – quite understandably and rightly so – experienced as unjust internal exile. This humiliation is clearly apparent in his memories: Cannons & Flowers recalls this period of his life with just a few extreme (exaggerated and over-dramatized) examples. Even though the artist would prefer to forget this rather lengthy intermezzo when he operated in the hospitality field, this chapter of the Cziffra legend is all the more fascinating for posterity. The ‘descent’ into the underworld of bars and clubs of this unequalled pianist represents the three very different periods in the story of the (regressive) development of the Budapest entertainment industry. Georges Cziffra’s first appearance as bar musician started at the conclusion of his ‘wunderkind-hood’, at a time when Pest nightlife offered world-class entertainment to each and every visitor, whether the Prince of Wales or the Maharajah of Kapurthala. Mention of these two VIP gentlemen is not by
chance since both attended the glittering Arizona revue run by the Rozsnyais at No. 20 Nagymező Street during the 1930s. The nightclub operating from 1932 right up until the tragic month of December 1944 witnessed everything from dancing girls being hoisted into the air, an elephant trampling onto the stage and a host of young artists including Alfonzó and the magician of the keyboards himself, Cziffra. If we are to believe the swirl of stories surrounding the history of the Arizona, it was in this very place that the 19-yearold Georges Cziffra met his soulmate, the Egyptian exotic dancer Soleika. The sudden romance quickly came to the attention of Mrs. Rozsnyai, that is, Miss Arizona, and she immediately got rid of the two lovers.
It is certain that the Arizona was not the only music nightclub in which Cziffra featured prior to his call-up into the army in 1942, although on the whole the artist remained tight-lipped about this first foray into the hospitality-entertainment industry. All he was prepared to say was this: “One day I decided that I was going to earn some money. […] I became acquainted with a lot of nightclub musicians. It appeared that they liked me because they helped me get into the world of dance music. Naturally all this happened at night, once they had finished work, propping up a bar, glass in hand. Later on they invited me to where they were playing, saying, come along, pick up some experience. So a little while later I became a dance musician and this was my vocation for a long time.” Cziffra returned to this calling when, after the war and captivity under the Soviets as a POW, he returned to Budapest in September 1946. In the bustling and yet stifling atmosphere of the coalition years the Pest nightlife of clubs and bars was reborn – but by that time it had irretrievably lost its once so proudly proclaimed ‘high society’ character. While the nightclubs and other music venues of the 1930s together formed a richly nuanced and stratified metropolitan entertainment industry, in the second half of the 1940s, beyond the terrible destruction of the Second World War and before the arrival of the new authoritarian regime, all this was a mere shadow of what had been. Despite this, the desire for entertainment and clamour for music were all the more frantic in these years, proof of which is to be found in the Hit series of Szilárd Darvas as well as the best of the hit-writing careers of Georges G. Dénes and Rudolf Halász, not forgetting the singing career of János Vámosi which launched at that time and immediately transported him to the heights of fame. If we are to believe the reminiscences of Georges Cziffra (and everything should be taken with a
pinch of salt), he received his first contract as a pianist (autumn 1946) in a sort of groping, orgy-like dive frequented by homosexuals, before he soon transferred to a pub, the owner of which was arrested shortly thereafter on a charge of multiple homicide. Far more important (and quite a bit more likely) than these overdramatized episodes, which at times appeared worthy of inclusion in a penny dreadful, is what Cziffra had to say about his fame as a one-time bar musician: ‘Everyone in Budapest knew of my staggering improvisations, which went from jazz, the fandango and the czardas to the passodoble. […] I thus became a star of the night-time music “espresso” bar-cafés in Budapest, and at a significantly increased night honorarium. […] I ended up dividing the nights between several lucrative places, spending two
’Bending my spine’
hours or so at each. The overwhelming majority of the guests were young intellectuals or fresh graduates of the piano.’ The above quote gives a true report on the increasing popularity of Cziffra as well as the expansion of a new kind of ‘catering unit’. The ‘espresso’ bar-café took the place of the coffee house although it, too, was a coffee-focused locale, typically with a much smaller floor area (and under increased political surveillance), but it continued to serve as a public space for social interaction and music. In the meantime the transitional coalition period came to an end, although Cziffra’s second detour as bar pianist lasted right up to 1950, when he was imprisoned for attempting to defect. The single party state that now controlled Hungary
allowed some of the music clubs and bars to stay open for the sake of appearances and to make them easier to monitor, as well as the fact that figures from the different levels of the state apparatus enjoyed the occasional visit to such venues. For instance, to listen to brilliant, good or pleasing piano music, for the fact was that bar piano playing in Pest was not the sole preserve of the astonishing virtuosity of Cziffra. For instance, the 156-cm-tall giant Rezső Seress amazed diners at the Kulacs (Osváth Street) and Kispipa (Akácfa Street) – without having any real training as a pianist and with no melodic voice. “Not a musician, just a genius,” is what Otto Klemperer, who at that time was working at the Opera, said of him, and just like Seress, so too a certain Mr. Tantos (the far more dextrous pianist of the Luxor on Szent István Boulevard) had a large following in which litterateur regulars also belonged. In 1953, Georges Cziffra – who was released from prison in a much wasted state and with damaged hands – once again found the means to support his family in this environment which, in the meantime, had continued to go downhill and started to fragment. ‘Bending my spine, I sank back into the world of nightclubs, my only source of a livelihood, and once again I started tramping from locale to bar, from bar to locale. […] Like a well-trained beast of burden, I was soon back in harness and my hands ran up and down all sorts of keyboards in restaurants, taverns and bars,’ he wrote bitterly about his return. Yet, for all this, his virtuosity and marvellous improvisational skills quickly rekind-
led his fame and made him much sought-after. There is a dialogue dating from this period as told by Tamás Vásáry that runs thus: “Who’s playing the four-hand in the back room? Oh, that’s just Cziffra.” It is at this moment that the professor of piano at the Liszt Academy Georges Ferenczy, who years earlier had discovered the hugely talented artist, came to play a vital part in the life of Cziffra: “In 1950, one evening I wandered into the Kedves coffee bar and all at once my ears were assailed by remarkable piano music. Who could it be that is on the one hand playing such entertaining music, and on the other hand is freely improvising so superbly?” In his memoirs Cziffra remembers Ferenczy making contact with the down-at-heel musician after his release from prison in 1953, once again in a bar: ‘One evening, two men came in for a drink in the bar where I had just gone on duty. […] One was a piano professor at the Liszt Academy, Georges Ferenczy; his friend held a high position at the Ministry for Cultural Affairs.
‘We’ve been following you around for some while,” said the professor, “because we’re most intrigued by your past record and even more by your playing.’ This meeting meant the end of Georges Cziffra’s bar pianist days, to be replaced by the triumphal progress of the great concert pianist celebrated first by Hungarian, then international audiences. Cziffra made up for all the wasted years at incredible speed. However, there is still something that we should be grateful for in all these years: a musician legend who went far beyond the borders of classical music and whose presence can still be perceived to this day at various points around Budapest, from the site of the former Savoy to Mai Manó House.
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Less than a year later I met Soleilka. It was love at first sight and a few days later we got married without our parents’ permission, stealing our identity cards to do so. GEORGES CZIFFRA | CANNONS & FLOWERS
Pictures of the Festival Highlights of the Georges Cziffra Festival’s past five years
János Balázs pianist, founder of Georges Cziffra Festival
János Balázs, one of the most successful and acclaimed pianists in classical music in Hungary, is renowned for his performances in the world’s most prestigious concert venues. He is one of the few artists equally loved by audiences, fellow professionals, and music critics. In 2019, at the age of 31, Mr. Balázs was awarded Hungary’s highest cultural award, the Kossuth Prize, following in the footsteps of revered Hungarian artists such as András Schiff, György Ligeti and Iván Fischer. Mr. Balázs has performed with soloists and conductors such as Mischa Maisky, Tamás Vásáry, Jose Cura, Stéphane Denéve, Jukka Iisakkila, Charles-Olivier Munroe, Roger Bausier, David Mathues, Ádám Medveczky, Gwendolyn Masin, and István Várdai and has played concerts with the Brussels Philharmonic, the Dortmund Philharmonic, the Aspen Philharmonic Orchestra, the Nagoya Symphonic Orchestra, the Zagreb Radio Orchestra, the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra, the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra, the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. In the last few years Mr. Balázs gave concerts to great public acclaim in the Bozar (Brussels), the Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), the Musikverein (Vienna), the Palau de Musica (Barcelona), the Barbican (London), the Cologne Philharmonie, and the Tchaikovsky Conservatory (Moscow). Mr. Balázs is a regular soloist in ’The Piano’ concert series in Budapest, which also features Grigory Sokolov, Evgeni Koroliov, Nikolai Lugansky, and Arcadi Volodos, among others. His solo concerts and concert series offer a unique experience for his audiences. His three innovative
series ‟Three Portraits of János Balázs,” ‟Three Portraits of the Piano,” and ‟PianOpera” have drawn enthusiastic crowds. Mr. Balázs is also one of the few classical musicians who is willing and able to improvise at live concerts. Born in Budapest in 1988, Mr. Balázs earned his degree from the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. In 2011 he played all works composed for the piano by Chopin in a series of 16 concerts, receiving a national honour from the Polish government for the achievement. He has won six international piano competitions among others the Aspen Concerto Competition, also in 2011. During the 2013/2014 concert season, Mr. Balázs received an award as Rising Star Artist of the Season in competition against musicians from 19 countries. This award launched a tour of the greatest concert halls of Europe, organised by the ECHO network (European Concert Hall Organisation). In 2015 Mr. Balázs received the Liszt Ferenc Award, the highest national honour bestowed on musicians by the Hungarian government. At the end of the same year he received the Gramofon Award for Hungarian Classical Music. The following year he founded the Georges Cziffra Festival in homage to his hero and idol. The festival has since blossomed into one of the most prestigious classical music events in Hungary. Since 2017 he has been a member of the jury of ’Virtuosi’ a classical music talent show broadcast by Hungarian television. This year Mr. Balázs became the artistic director of the Cultural Center Georges Cziffra. He is member of the Hungarian Art Academy. Since 2019 he has been a piano professor at the Liszt Academy Budapest.
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From Janos Balazs’ first notes on the Massry Center’s Steinway grand piano you knew you were in the presence of greatness. The young man’s fingers had that magical touch that only a few in recent history have had: Artur Rubinstein, Glenn Gould and maybe even Van Cliburn - the winner of the Russian Chopin competition which helped melt the Cold War just a little so many decades ago. ANDRZEJ PILARCZYK | NIPPERTOWN
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