Ádám Szokolay

Winner of the 2019 Bartók World Competition and a Junior Prima Prize recipient, Ádám Szokolay has given concerts throughout Europe and North America, in such venues as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Salle Cortot in Paris, the National Philharmonic Hall in Vilnius, the Great Hall of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music and the Palace of Arts in Budapest. As a soloist, he has appeared with the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra, the Savaria-, Győr- and Miskolc Symphony Orchestras, the Budapest Strings and the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra among others, with such conductors as János Kovács, Mátyás Antal and Zsolt Hamar.

Szokolay is regularly invited for solo recitals in the Franz Liszt Memorial Museum and the Béla Bartók Memorial House in Budapest. As an active chamber musician, he has participated in international festivals like the Villa Musica Festival in Mainz; Encuentro di Música in Santander, Spain; with such eminent partners as Boris Garlitsky, Zakhar Bron and Dénes Várjon. In 2022 the BBC Radio broadcasted his recital with a program of works by Béla Bartók. As a member of the S.O.S. Talents Foundation by renowned French pianist and composer Michel Sogny, he appeared on stages of Paris, Vilnius and Batumi, in concerts broadcasted by Mezzo TV worldwide. In 2017 he assembled his own orchestra with fellow students of the Bard Conservatory, performing Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

As a prizewinner of numerous international competitions – the Yamaha Young Performing Artists Competition, the Stecher & Horowitz New York International Piano Competition, the Carl Filtsch International Competition in Romania and the György Ferenczy International Chopin Piano Competition in Budapest -, Szokolay was awarded the Sári Bíró Memorial Award, the Fischer Annie Scholarship and the Kocsis-Hauser Foundation’s Prize in Hungary for his artistic work. Between 2015-2018 he was a recipient of the Belinda & Stephen Kaye Full Scholarship at the Bard Conservatory in New York.

Born in 1996, Ádám Szokolay started playing the piano at the age of four, under the guidance of his mother. In 2005 he was accepted to the Special School for Talented Children in the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, as one of the youngest students in the history of the school. He continued his studies at the Bard College Conservatory of Music in New York, the Franz Liszt Hochschule für Musik in Weimar and the Mozarteum University in Salzburg, in the classes of Peter Serkin, Grigory Gruzman and Imre Rohmann. Szokolay is currently based in Budapest, where he completed his Master’s degree in the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, under Dénes Várjon and András Kemenes.

He has participated in the master classes and took lessons of extraordinary artists like György Kurtág, Ferenc Rados, Zoltán Kocsis, Rita Wagner, Márta Gulyás, Gábor Takács-Nagy, Péter Csaba, Richard Goode, Mikhail Voskresensky, Stanislav Ioudenitch, Claudio Martínez-Mehner, Eldar Nebolsin, Mūza Rubackytė, Milana Chernyavska, Ruben Dalibaltayan and Martin Helmchen. His uncle, pianist Balázs Szokolay, has been a mentor to him and has supported his musical growth since early childhood.