released August 29, 2022

Julien von Karolyi, piano

Recordings made during 1953 and 1954

A programme note on Schumann's Kreisleriana may be found at:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreisleriana

Julian von Károlyi (born January 31, 1914 in Lučenec, † March 1, 1993 in Munich) was a German pianist of Hungarian origin.

Julian von Károlyi was born into the Károlyi von Nagykároly family, one of the oldest Hungarian noble families. As a child he took piano lessons from Louis Akom, a well-known Budapest organist, and made rapid artistic progress. As early as 1926 he made his debut in Budapest with great success, playing Mozart's E flat major concerto. This attracted the interest of Béla Bartók, who recommended him to the famous piano teacher Margit Varró (1881–1978), who directed his further education. He later studied with Joseph Pembaur in Munich, from 1927 to 1930 as a Gewandhaus scholarship holder with Max von Pauer at the Leipzig Conservatory, in 1931 with Alfred Cortot in Paris and finally from 1932 to 1934 with Ernst von Dohnányi at the Franz Liszt Music Academy in Budapest .

In 1929 von Károlyi gave his first public piano recital in London, and in 1930 the bassist Fedor Chaliapin undertook a large-scale tour of England with him as his accompanist. His international breakthrough was marked by an extremely successful recital at the Royal Albert Hall in London. From 1934 he gave concerts regularly and played under the most prominent conductors and orchestras of the period, for instance in Berlin, Paris, London, Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, Stockholm, Helsinki, Riga, the USA (since 1951), in South America, the Near and Far East and in almost all major German cities. In the early 1940s, Julian von Károlyi settled permanently in Munich, where he lived at Nibelungenstraße 12. In 1956 he took German citizenship. From 1972 he held a professorship at the University of Music in Würzburg.

Julian von Károlyi had a brilliant technique and was one of the greatest virtuosos of his time. He is best known for his recordings and interpretations of the piano works by Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt and Sergej Rachmaninoff, several of which he recorded for Deutsche Grammophon from 1943 to the early 1950s and for Electrola from 1958 to 1960. When recording works for piano and orchestra, he worked with conductors such as Edmund Nick, Hans Rosbaud, Robert Heger, István Kertész and Gilka Zdravkovic. German radio stations recorded a number of works with Károlyi in the 1950s, including music by Debussy, Dohnányi, Kodály as well as by several of the composers already mentioned. He has been described as 'a frequently magnetic romantic stylist' (Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International)