Peter Takacs

Widely recognized for his complete cycle of Beethoven sonatas, pianist Peter Takács is also a significant educator. He is a longtime member of the faculty of Ohio's Oberlin Conservatory. Takács was born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1946. He took up the piano at age three, following in the footsteps of an older sister whose performances he would critique. He made his concert debut at seven and seemed on the path to becoming a prominent pianist in Romania, frequently performing in his home city. However, opportunities dried up when his parents asked to be allowed to emigrate to the West. He was banned from performing and even studying piano, but his piano teacher continued to give him lessons clandestinely, and when his family was finally allowed to leave Romania, he was accepted as a student at the Conservatoire de Paris. The family arrived in the U.S. in 1962, and Takács earned a bachelor's degree at Northwestern University near Chicago in 1968. He went on for a master's at the University of Illinois and doctoral studies at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. Among his teachers were Leon Fleisher and Howard Karp. Takács held a Tanglewood Piano Fellowship in 1976, and that year, he joined the faculty at Oberlin. Several prizes and grants helped his career along, including first prize at the William Kapell International Competition, the C.D. Jackson Award for Chamber Music at Tanglewood, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Takács has continued to teach at Oberlin ever since, but he has made room for a schedule of choice recitals and recordings as a performer. He made his recording debut with the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble in 1989 with the album New Music from Oberlin: Edward J. Miller and Michael Daugherty. In 2011, on the Cambria label, he issued a lavishly packaged complete cycle of Beethoven's piano sonatas, including unnumbered early works and adorned with Takács' own booklet notes. That set was reissued in the early 2020s. In 2022, Takács joined cellist Robert deMaine on a complete recording of Beethoven's music for cello and piano on the Leaf Music label.
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