Tamás Vásáry

Tamás Vásáry was a Hungarian concert pianist and conductor who made an international career, living in Switzerland from 1956 and later in London from 1970. He was known for interpreting music of the Romantic era, especially by Chopin, Liszt and Schumann. He began as a child prodigy, playing an early Mozart Concerto at age eight and studying at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music from age twelve. He taught there as an assistant to Zoltán Kodály. He was a finalist of both the V International Chopin Piano Competition and the Long-Thibaud-Crespin Competition in 1955, and of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 1956. Due to political unrest, he left Hungary for Switzerland in 1956, recording for Deutsche Grammophon and playing concerts, in the United States from 1961 and regularly at European festivals. He moved to London in 1970 where he began to conduct, becoming joint principal conductor of the Northern Sinfonia and principal conductor of the Bournemouth Sinfonietta. In 1993, he became principal conductor of the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamás_V...) under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...)