Taken from the old website. Original post date: July 9, 2005

I am often asked to repeat his name…
Cziffra – Gyorgy Cziffra.

(OK, so it’s not as easy to remember as Bond – James Bond.)

But I am very pleased to see the revival of Cziffra amongst today’s listening audience. Gyorgy Cziffra was a Hungarian composer/pianist who lived at the heart of the 20th century’s greatest virtuosi. Although he was born in 1921 to a poor family of gypsy musicians, it wasn’t until 1947 that he was able to grow his career due to military services and even being a POW. In spite of wide acclaim, he (like Horowitz at one point) abandoned his career until the early 1990s when he gave a concert in Paris.

The Cziffra foundation in Paris which provides rare information on this unique composer seems to be doing well, selling manuscripts to an international market.

Cziffra’s own recordings have the unique ability of stimulating tremendous excitement onto the listener. He was a master of adding fire and passion to any piece he touched, and had an unrivaled facility which allowed him to execute extremely difficult passages. Who else but Cziffra could take an already difficult theme such as Rimsky-Korsakoff’s Flight of the Bumblebee and turn it into alternating octaves between the hands AND play it in a flowing manner- without making it sound like chopping liver?
I think he is not performed often enough today because of the improvisatory nature of his music. We live in such a digital age where each day, beautiful music is being turned into a monotonous ring tone for the latest cell phone. Today’s ‘artists’ are, in fact, the sound engineers more than the performers themselves, as they continuously produce music that sounds cleaner and more digital.

I, myself, was fiercely criticized after a performance I did in Warsaw, Poland back in 1997. I composed a piece during my first month in Warsaw called “City Traffic” which reflected the culture shock I experienced upon moving into the big European metropolis. Although I had written every note down, and even used the classic sonata-allegro form, I was criticized for writing “out-dated music which sounded too improvisatory”. In other words, anything that even sounds improvisatory is now considered old-fashioned. It took me months to recover and it took me years until I could write another note of music again.

I believe that our new generation of musicians will begin to realize the benefits of supporting improvisation more and more strongly. After all, all of the greatest pianists of the last century were essentially improvising on stage.