György Sándor

György Sándor (21 September 1912 – 9 December 2005) was a Hungarian pianist, friend of Béla Bartók and champion of his music.

Sándor was born in Budapest. He studied at the Liszt Academy in Budapest under Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, and debuted as a performer in 1930. He toured as a concert pianist through the 1930s, making his Carnegie Hall debut in 1939. He became an American citizen and served in the Army Signal Corps and the Intelligence and Special Services from 1942 to 1944.

Sándor remained friends with Bartók throughout his life, and was one of only ten people who attended Bartók's funeral in 1945. Sándor played the world premiere of Bartók's Piano Concerto No. 3 on 8 February, 1946 with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy in Philadelphia, Pa. The performance was repeated later that year by the same ensemble in New York, and recorded for Columbia Masterworks.

Following the war, he returned to the concert stage. His repertoire concentrated on Hungarian and Russian works. He recorded the complete piano works of Kodály, of Prokofiev, and of Bartók; for the latter he won the Grand Prix du Disque of the Charles Cros Academy in 1965.

In 1950 he married Christa, née Satzgár de Balvanyós, the divorced wife of Archduke Karl Pius of Austria. They had one son, Michael, and were divorced. Sándor taught at the Southern Methodist University, then at the University of Michigan, and from 1982, at the Juilliard School. He continued to teach and perform into his nineties. His pupils included Hélène Grimaud, Gyorgy Sebok, Christina Kiss, Barbara Nissman, Ian Pace, fortepiano performer Malcolm Bilson and composer Ezequiel Viñao. In 1996 New York University awarded Sandor an honorary doctorate.

He wrote a book "On Piano Playing: Motion, Sound, Expression", published by Schirmer Books, which is one of the most rational and clear accounts of piano technique. "Today more than ever, audiences mistake the excessively tense muscular activities of the performer for an intense musical experience, and all too often we see the public impressed and awed by convulsive distortions and spastic gyrations." Writing in The Guardian newspaper, Leo Black commented "musical performance desperately needs the sense of rightness, completeness and economy that pervaded his playing and thinking".

A manuscript of a book on Bartók and his music remains unpublished.

He died in New York of heart failure.

References

* [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/14/arts/music/14sandor.html New York Times obituary]

External links

* [http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1694919,00.html Guardian obituary]
* [http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20051223/ai_n15963234 Independent obituary]
* [http://www.juilliard.edu/update/journal/j_articles785.html Juilliard Journal obituary]