Géza Anda

Since his passing at age 55 in 1976, Géza Anda’s once-considerable standing has receded from prominence. In his prime, though, he was acclaimed as an extraordinary pianist whose innate technical command lent an uncommon closeness to his interpretations, even at the summit of his signature work, the Brahms Concerto in B-flat major. He first presented that piece in Budapest in 1939, with Willem Mengelberg on the podium.

Born in Budapest in 1921, Anda studied with Imre Stefaniai and Imre Keeri-Szanto before entering the class of Ernst von Dohnányi at the Royal Music Academy. A grant took him to Berlin, where he appeared in Franck’s Symphonic Variations under Furtwängler. He stayed in the city through the opening years of World War II, then escaped to Switzerland in 1942 and there met Edwin Fischer. Fischer championed directing Mozart concertos from the keyboard, a practice Anda later adopted, extending it to the entire cycle, including the early works. At a time when programs offered only the most familiar concertos, he became one of the first to survey the complete series; his 1960s recordings with the Camerata Academica of the Salzburg Mozarteum remain a landmark in the discography.

Anda’s playing was marked by lucid textures and a vocal quality that led Furtwängler to call him a “troubadour” of the piano. His immaculate technique supported highly personal readings; his Schumann performances, for example, unfolded in multiple dimensions, threaded with parenthetical observations and apt introspective commentary drawn from within the notes themselves. A decisive influence was his artistic partnership with the Romanian pianist Clara Haskil, with whom he performed two-piano repertoire from 1953 to 1958. Her ethical insistence on conveying music’s essence sharpened his own insight, channeling his strong musical personality toward the service of the score.

Although his repertory embraced the central Classical-Romantic literature, Anda is most likely to be remembered for his accounts of the three piano concertos of his countryman Béla Bartók, which he recorded in 1959 and 1960. These performances exemplify technical fluency and artistic authority and continue to be available. A few months before the close of his abbreviated life, he entered the studio to record a final testament: waltzes by Chopin, shaped in an astonishingly otherworldly manner that lets the triple-time pulse hover almost motionless, as though observed from a remote and ethereal vantage.