Gábor Farkas Presented by Liszt Academy

“In my opinion, a real musician plays everything from Bach to the contemporaries,” said once the concert pianist Gábor Farkas, who holds the prestigious Liszt State Award and the Steinway Artist title, he is also the Head of the Keyboard and Harp Department at the Liszt Academy, Budapest since September 2020. He felt this was important to emphasize because having won among others two international Liszt competitions, concert promoters and record companies tended to ask him to perform almost exclusively Liszt works, even though he himself has been striving for years to show the true diversity of his repertoire. This is why his present programme doesn’t include the works of the legendary Hungarian virtuoso, but rather the genre of Fantasy. The term has been used since the Renaissance period and has inspired many composers throughout the history of music, and a collection of these works spanning from the Viennese Classical to the late Romantic period are performed at the concert. In the first half of the concert, we can hear Mozart and Schumann pieces composed in their late twenties, while in the second half, Gábor Farkas performs early works from Rachmaninov’s oeuvre: the first movement of Morceaux de fantaisie, composed in 1892 when he was only nineteen, and the first of five piano pieces, as well as the Six Moments Musicaux, composed a few years later in 1896.