Biography (read more)
György Sebők was born in Szeged, Hungary, on 2 November 1922. He gave his first solo recital at eleven and at fourteen played Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto under Ferenc Fricsay. At sixteen he entered the Franz Liszt Academy, where he studied with Zoltán Kodály and Leo Weiner.
Conscripted into the German army during the Second World War, he was, as a Jew, set to breaking rocks in the Carpathian Mountains. After the war he spent ten years concertising across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and in 1949 was appointed professor at the Béla Bartók Conservatory in Budapest. He won the Grand Prix du Disque in 1957.
Following the Hungarian uprising of 1956 he settled in Paris, recording for Erato. At forty he joined the Indiana University School of Music at Bloomington, encouraged by the cellist János Starker. He was also a guest professor at the Berlin Hochschule der Künste and an honorary life member of the Toho School of Music in Tokyo, and taught regularly at the Banff Centre and at the conservatories of Amsterdam, Barcelona and Stuttgart. He founded summer master classes at Ernen in Switzerland in 1973 and the Festival der Zukunft there in 1987, and was made an honorary citizen of Ernen, only the third in eight hundred years. He died in Bloomington on 14 November 1999, aged 77.
Sebők’s importance is chiefly as a teacher, and the testimony to it comes from musicians rather than from critics. János Starker, who brought him to Indiana, called him the greatest pianist who ever lived. The pianist Jeremy Denk dedicated his memoir Every Good Boy Does Fine to him and documented his influence at length.
The reach of that teaching was deliberate and international. Beyond the decades at Bloomington he held or accepted positions in Berlin, Tokyo, Banff, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Stuttgart, and the summer master classes he founded at Ernen in 1973 became a fixed point in the calendar for students from across Europe and North America. The Festival der Zukunft he established there in 1987 extended the same work into public performance.
His own playing is preserved from the Paris years, when he recorded for Erato, and his Grand Prix du Disque of 1957 marks the point at which he was recognised as a recording artist as well as a concert pianist.
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