Zsombor Toth-Vajna

Zsombor Tóth-Vajna is a Research Fellow and Royal College of Music Studentship holder.

His research area is the performance practice of Restoration period keyboard music with a special focus on the works of John Blow and Henry Purcell, North-German organ music, and early Hungarian keyboard music.

Zsombor is one of the leading figures of the young musician generation in Hungary. He studied harpsichord and organ at the Ferenc Liszt Academy with Miklós Spányi, where he graduated with the highest honours. He continued his studies at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam with Menno van Delft (harpsichord, clavichord), Richard Egarr (harpsichord, Amsterdam fortepiano), and Jacques van Oortmerssen (organ). He also holds a degree in medicine from Semmelweis University.

He has performed throughout Europe and in the USA as soloist, conductor and continuo in various orchestras. Zsombor is the founder and artistic director of Hungarian baroque orchestra Harmonia Caelestis, and is a passionate piano four-hands player with his twin brother Gergely under the name Piano e Forte Duo. Zsombor has recorded ten solo recordings for different labels. As a conductor he specialises in the music of Purcell, Handel and Bach.

Zsombor has been awarded the Semmelweis University Kerpel Prize (2013), grants for talented Hungarian youth (2015, 2017, 2018), the Hungarian Bach Prize (2019), the Honorary Medal of Buda Castle, the Hungarian Gold Cross of the Order of Merit (2024) and Hungary’s highest decoration for music, the Liszt Ferenc Prize (2025). He was elected among the 50 most talented young Hungarians by La Femme Magazine in 2015.

Zsombor’s musical credo is: “Artists are like interpreters. They mediate between the author and the audience in a language they are intimately familiar with, and as the interpreter is free to choose among different synonyms, syntactic tools and so on, so does the artist add their own personality and message to the conveyed piece (while delivering a required minimum of the source material, of course). After all, our goal is this: to communicate through a universal medium that everyone can understand, and this medium is music itself.”