Hungarian Pianist Duo Perform in NYC

On the programme will be Erik Satie's Socrate, arranged for two pianos by John Cage, and Franz Liszt's Via Crucis for piano duet. Klukon and Ránki recently recorded both works on an album published by BMC.

 

Edit Klukon was born in Budapest and studied at the Liszt Academy of Music. Early in her career she specialized in chamber music and piano songs. She has worked with many great singers such as Dénes Gulyás, László Polgár, Lucia Popp, and Ruth Ziesak. Lately her interests have turned to solo piano works, especially of Liszt and Haydn.

Dezső Ránki began piano lessons at the age of eight and studied at the Liszt Academy of Music. From the time Ránki won first prize at the International Schumann Competition in Zwickau he has had an international career performing in Europe, Scandinavia, the Soviet Union, the USA and Japan. Ránki's repertoire includes Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, and the Romantics including Schumann, Bartók and Kurtág. In 1972, Ránki was awarded the Grand Prix de l'Académie Charles Cros for a recording of works by Chopin. He has also been presented with Hungary's highest award for artists, the Kossuth Prize.

Edit Klukon and Dezső Ránki started playing together in 1985. Both pianists became very interested in the wonderful world of the piano music composed for four-hand piano and two pianos, and regularly perform duo-recitals. One of their most interesting productions was a performance of Liszt's unpublished two-piano version of his own Faust Symphony, and Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in a transcription for two pianos by Liszt. The duo has become increasingly more interested in contemporary music and frequently play the two-piano pieces of Barnabás Dukay.

 

The Angel Orensanz Center is housed in a former synagogue built in 1849 by the Berlin-based architect Alexander Seltzer, who drew inspiration for his design from the cathedral of Cologne and the German romantic movement. The structure witnessed the birth of the Jewish reform movement in America, but it fell into disuse with the decay of the Yiddish Lower East Side after World War II.

 

In 1986, the sculptor Angel Orensanz bought the building as a studio. It was later transformed into a beacon of education and culture in New York, hosting performances and talks by important artists and thinkers such as Lou Reed, Whitney Houston, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, the Kronos Quartett, Jacques Derrida and Spike Lee

 

Source: Fidelio.hu / Hungarian Culture Center in New York / Angel Orensanz Foundation