Great Performers: Géza Anda
The Hungarian pianist Géza Anda was an aristocrat, dubbed "the troubadour of the piano" by no less than legendary conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. While he dismissed pedantic musicology, the debonair Anda was a perfectionist and a stickler for detail, holding a high standard for his students and colleagues and an even higher one for himself. Listening to his very first recordings of 1943, he stated "I knew nothing, but I believed," while those he made a decade later for EMI's Columbia label fared better – though with typical self-criticism he wondered if he could still play as well.
Read more…The great musician succumbed to cancer at the age of 55 in 1976 after a three-decade international career, leaving behind a sizeable discography that still did not reflect the breadth of his repertoire. One of his few recorded Bach performances is a 1972 Salzburg traversal of the Partita No.2, precise yet warm, architecturally clear yet filled with spirit. His account of the second movement of the C Major Concerto K.467 was featured in the 1967 Swedish film 'Elvira Madigan', so popular that this concerto was popularly known by the film's name at the time; his playing here – part of the first ever recording of the complete Mozart Concertos – reveals the burnished phrasing, crystalline articulation and warm tone that were characteristic of his pianism.
Anda's records for Columbia in the 1950s are particularly mesmerizing: produced by Walter Legge, who was responsible for Dinu Lipatti's legendary recordings, these performances showcase jaw-dropping technical mastery put solely to the service of the music. A 1955 Beethoven Piano Concerto No.1 is brimming over with charm and exuberance, while his readings of Schumann’s 'Etudes symphoniques' and Brahms's 'Variations on a Theme of Paganini' from his 1953 debut disc may have no equal: they feature staggeringly clear articulation with fluid singing lines, a steady rhythmic pulse with supple phrasing, and some of the most beautiful tonal colours and refined dynamic shadings ever recorded.
Although Anda recorded Brahms's Second Piano Concerto while with the DG label, his 1954 broadcast performance with Otto Klemperer captures with unbridled passion the full grandeur of the work with which he had made his debut in his native Hungary over a dozen years earlier at the age of 20. Utterly uninhibited, Anda fuses passion and intellect to perfection, plumbing the depths of the work's lyrical and emotional content.
His legendary records of Bartók were as famous as his Mozart cycle – indeed, Anda stated that “if one understood what a musical phrase means, there was no longer any difference in the approach to music between Mozart and Bartók” – and once again some earlier traversals are even more satisfying than his critically acclaimed studio accounts. A 1952 Lucerne Festival reading of the Second Piano Concerto with Ferenc Fricsay – with whom he collaborated on his DG discs – sizzles with unparalleled frenetic energy, while 'For Children', recorded for Columbia, is a model of how to play 20th-century music with beautiful tone and sumptuous phrasing. We hear the same qualities in a stupendous broadcast performance of a work he did not officially record, Bartók's Suite Op.10.
As debonair and refined at the keyboard as he was in his person, Anda left a rich legacy noble interpretations that continues to delight listeners decades after his untimely death.
[Due to geo-blocking restrictions, some tracks might be unavailable in certain territories.]