József Balog Presented by Liszt Academy

“When you get to the point of thinking that this piece cannot be any better, that is when the quality of that piece in your performance starts declining,” József Balog, one of the most famous pianists on today’s Hungarian music scene, said recalling advice from Zoltán Kocsis. This conviction is typical of Balog's focused, artistic personality combining self-evident virtuosity with pure, simple forms, but it also reflects at least as much that creative thinking and aesthetic stance linking the compositions on today’s concert programme. The works of Kodály, Lajtha, Szokolay and the Transylvanian Csaba Szabó are all representative of 20th century Hungarian piano music. The programme offers a series of lyrical, pictorial miniatures, which are not primarily characterized by some kind of experimental approach but rather, as Aladár Tóth formulated it in relation to Kodály’s Seven Pieces for Piano, Opus 11, “the analytical simplification of the mode of expression”.