Zsuzsa Elekes Presented by Liszt Academy

The international career of Zsuzsa Elekes was launched with her victory at the International Bach Competition in Leipzig in 1980; since then she has given several hundred recitals in churches, concert halls and major festivals in virtually every country in Europe. In the meantime, as a teacher at the Béla Bartók Music High School in Budapest, she has initiated hundreds of students into the mysteries of the queen of instruments over some three decades and recorded 15 solo albums of the finest organ works by Bach, Liszt, the German Romantics and 20th century Hungarian composers. This programme features principally those works that are rarely or never performed in concert. In the first half, there is a grandiose Bach piece plus a real curiosity: a composition by Elek Huzella written in memory of a friend who died in the 1956 Revolution. After the break, the public can hear creations dating from around the time of the construction of the magical Voit organ in the Liszt Academy, but the Belgian Jongen’s French-style heroic sonata evoking the Romantic style similarly finds the perfect milieu within the walls decked in gilded laurel wreaths of the Grand Hall.