Thirteen-year-old Zoltán Kocsis was on the staircase at his music school in Budapest when he spotted a new boy. He asked the boy’s name and then threw down a challenge: “Give me a theme and I will improvise a five-part fugue on it.”
Years later Kocsis, by now an international pianist, would team up with that new boy — Ivan Fischer, a celebrated conductor — to create the Budapest Festival Orchestra (BFO), drawing the cream of musicians from Hungary into what became one of the most celebrated European ensembles.
Kocsis, while conducting the BFO from time to time, was also making a name for himself as a composer and as a pianist — often appearing as soloist with the orchestra. Harold Schonberg, the US critic, once wrote: “He has an extraordinary technique that enables him to deliver the notes with utter clarity; his interpretations are marked by intelligence, spirit and temperament; and he produces a lovely singing sound from his instrument.”
Reviewers in Britain were similarly in awe. “Rarely can Bach have emerged less complacent, more a man of strong individual temperament,” wrote Joan Chissell in The Times of his London debut in 1972, adding that his performance of Schumann’s Fantasiestücke was “not the music, or the interpretation, for sensation seekers, but something sensitively and personally involved enough to mark Mr Kocsis as someone very much out of the ordinary”.
Kocsis was indeed someone very much out of the ordinary. Yes, he might have bright eyes, curly hair and a round face that remained curiously childlike and inquisitive, but his performances at the keyboard were full of high- voltage athletic vigour, coupled with high-octane, edge-of-seat danger.
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He was no less inspiring as a conductor, with a great hand technique and an acute sense of rhythm. Even when a hundred musicians were playing, Kocsis could hear which one was out of place. “He was born with X-ray ears,” Fischer told Radio 3 after the announcement of his colleague’s death.
Zoltán Kocsis was born in Budapest in 1952, the only child of Ottó and Mária (née Mátyás). “We had a piano, but no one really taught me to play it,” he once said. “When I could hear the radio, I could play back anything I heard, in the same key and same rhythms, the same interpretation, everything.” His father took the young Zoltán to hear performances by Annie Fischer, the great Hungarian pianist.
His parents also took him to Magda Szmrecsányi, “a fantastic woman and a very good teacher”; later he studied at the Liszt Academy, where his teachers included György Kurtág and Pál Kadosa, whose assistant he became. In 1970 Hungarian Radio organised a Beethoven competition, which Kocsis won; the next year he was among a group of Hungarian cultural figures paraded for the western media at the Esterházy Palace; and in 1975 he met the Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, who would have a significant influence on his technique.
Soon Kocsis was receiving invitations to perform around the world. Although he travelled widely, unlike many Hungarian musicians Kocsis chose to remain in the country. Yes, he could be something of a troublemaker — in 1977 he signed a petition against the Communist government, while a decade later he composed Chernobyl ’86, highlighting the nuclear accident in Ukraine — but he grew to have a special place in the musical life of Hungary.
He was fiercely loyal to the country and its musicians, even defending the government as it lurched to the right in recent months. He was also loyal to Phillips, his record company — and they to him.
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In 1986 he married Adrienne Hauser, who also pursued a career as a pianist. They had a son and a daughter, of whom little is known. That marriage was dissolved and in 1997 he married Erika Toth, also a pianist. They had two children, one of whom, Krisztián Kocsis, has already achieved success at the keyboard.
Zoltán Kocsis’s relationship with the BFO soured in 1997. He was offered the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra and, applying the same high standards as before, required all the players to reaudition for their posts; 26 failed to make the grade.
Kocsis was always restless. When not playing the piano, conducting or composing, he would transcribe for piano the works of other composers.
An anaesthetist at an after-concert dinner in 2012 spotted symptoms of heart disease and urged Kocsis to get checked out. Within a week he had heart surgery. A year later he returned to the concert hall, but suffered a relapse in October. After his death Fischer described him as “a musical giant, one of the rare geniuses”, adding: “His impact on our whole generation is immeasurable.”
Zoltán Kocsis, pianist, conductor and composer, was born in Budapest on May 30, 1952. He died there from heart failure on November 6, 2016, aged 64