About György Cziffra
Christian Georges Cziffra (Hungarian: Krisztián György Cziffra; 5 November 1921 – 15 January 1994) was a Hungarian-French virtuoso pianist and composer. He is considered to be one of the greatest virtuoso pianists of the twentieth century. Among his teachers was Ernő Dohnányi, a pupil of István Thoman, who was a favourite pupil of Franz Liszt. Born in Budapest, he became a French national in 1968. Cziffra is known for his recordings of works of Franz Liszt, Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann, and also for his technically demanding arrangements or paraphrases of several orchestral works for the piano, including Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee and Johann Strauss II's The Blue Danube. Cziffra left a sizeable body of recordings. He lived in Senlis, a commune northeast of Paris, where he ran a foundation for young musicians and artists. In 1977 he founded the Cziffra Foundation, situated in the Saint Frambourg chapel in Senlis, Oise. In 1966, he founded the Festival de musique de La Chaise-Dieu in the Auvergne, whose pipe organ restoration he sponsored, and three years later he inaugurated a piano competition bearing his own name in Versailles.
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