Balázs Szokolay Piano Recital Presented by Liszt Academy

This piano recital of Liszt Prize winner Balázs Szokolay, who comes from a family of musicians, is woven around the genre of the fantasia. Over centuries, the term fantasia was most associated with the written improvization, allowing the talent, technique and invention of virtuosos to shine. Johann Sebastian Bach masterfully coupled the most structured of genres with the freest, so that Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue represents a major intellectual challenge for performers to this day. The fantasias of the two Viennese masters Mozart and Beethoven were considered extremely unusual in their day, while Schubert made the following remark with regard to Wanderer: “The Devil may play it”. Both Schumann and Chopin each composed a fantasia at an extremely difficult period in their lives; the motif from Isolde’s Love-Death is discernible in the work by Scriabin.