Biography (read more)
Zoltán Kocsis was born in Budapest on 30 May 1952 and died on 6 November 2016. Trained at the Bartók Conservatory and then the Liszt Academy under Pál Kadosa, Ferenc Rados and György Kurtág, he won the Hungarian Radio Beethoven Competition at eighteen, toured the United States the next year, and took the Liszt Prize in 1973 and the Kossuth Prize in 1978. From 1997 he directed the Hungarian National Philharmonic, conducting as much as he played.
Kocsis was the complete Hungarian musician of his generation: his recorded Bartók — the complete works for piano — remains the reference his countrymen are measured against, and his Debussy and Rachmaninoff won international prizes. Schoolmate and colleague of András Schiff and Dezső Ránki, he stands beside them in this catalogue as the third voice of a single tradition, which makes their overlapping repertoire unusually rewarding to compare.
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