Organ recital Balász Szabó

He is just thirty years old and took up his professorship at the mdw - University of Music and Performing Arts on March 1st, succeeding Martin Haselböck: Balázs Szabó. He studied in his home town of Budapest, in Würzburg, Trossingen, Rome and Utrecht, graduating not only in organ performance but also in musicology, among other subjects, and is also an organ expert. Numerous competitions he has won, such as the ION Music Festival in Nuremberg and the Grand Prix de Chartres, are testament to his virtuosity. In 2023, he was a guest at the Vienna Konzerthaus for the first time. Now he will once again demonstrate his skills on the organ in the Great Hall with an extremely evocative program that includes organ classics as well as rarities.

From Mozart to Florentz

The first half of the program is framed by two expressive late works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: the Fantasia in F minor K 608, which he describes in his catalog of works as an »organ piece for a clock« and was probably written for an organ automaton - machines that were quite common at the time. It is just as clear from this work as from his Adagio and Fugue for Strings in C minor K 645, which Balázs Szabó arranged for the organ. The composer Jean-Louis Florentz, who died in Paris in 2004 and was a pupil of Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Schaeffer, studied African and oriental music in depth and imagines the Ethiopian Orthodox liturgy in »Harpe de Marie«. Another pupil of Max Reger was Desider von Antalffy-Zsiross, who was born in Hungary but became successful in the USA. He composed several works inspired by paintings by Arnold Böcklin.
The second half of the program begins with a »Légende« by Franz Liszt about the miracle of St. Francis of Paola, who crossed the Strait of Messina sailing in his cloak: the sound of the waves, the roll of thunder and the whistling of the wind rise up before the listener's ears. The organ recital ends with Max Reger's Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue in E minor op. 127, first performed on the imposing Walcker organ at the opening of the Jahrhunderthalle in Wroclaw - the same year that the Rieger organ of the Konzerthaus in Vienna was inaugurated with a composition by Richard Strauss.