By Linda Stamato
Two guest appearances brightened Sunday in Morristown: The sun, and the acclaimed Hungarian pianist Peter Toth at the Washington’s Headquarters Historical Museum.
Toth has been invited several times to perform in this acoustically pleasing space, and a sparse but enthusiastic audience enjoyed his interpretations of Frederic Chopin’s Polonaise in C sharp minor, Op. 26, No. 1; and Three Nocturnes, Op. 15: F major; F sharp major and G minor.
He turned next to Franz Liszt, who has a special place in Toth’s repertoire. The audience was spellbound by his rendition of Ballade in B minor, S. 171, and overjoyed by the rousing, affecting performance of a the perennial favorite , Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.
Given Toth’s graceful and powerful interpretations of Liszt, it’s hardly surprising that Toth was invited to serve on the jury panel of the Franz Liszt International Piano and Voice Competition in Los Angeles (2014), and the Liszt-Garrison International Piano Competition in Baltimore (2015).
He has been member of the American Liszt Society since 2011.
Toth’s repertoire is wide and diverse, ranging from J.S. Bach to contemporary music, with a particular focus on piano music of the 19th century. He is an enthusiastic interpreter of the works of Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and Brahms.
The National Park Service will be welcoming Toth back quite soon, and there appears to be good reason to suspect the audience will be treated to Beethoven.
Toth is a piano faculty member at Rutgers University, and also teaches piano at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison.
Free performances at the museum, part of the Morristown National Historical Park, are especially rewarding, given the splendid sound of the museum’s exquisite 19th-century Steinway — a gift, too, to the artists given the opportunity to play it.
