Tamás Pálfalvi
Hungarian-born Tamás Pálfalvi started to study the trumpet with István Szabó. At the age of fifteen he won the first prize and the Grand Prize at Hungary’s National Trumpet Competition. During his high school years he won numerous prizes in international competitions and performed as a soloist with well-known orchestras. In 2009, he was awarded a scholarship for Bard College in New York, where he studied under Carl Albach and Edward Carroll until 2012. He then returned to Budapest to study at Franz Liszt Music Academy under Gábor Boldoczki. Through winning the Bard College Concerto Competition, the first trumpet player to do so, he performed as a soloist with the American Symphony Orchestra. Pálfalvi has performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York, Suntory Hall and Kitara Hall in Japan, NCPA Beijing, Shanghai Grand Theatre, Hong Kong Cultural Center, or Harvard’s Sanders Theater, as well as festivals such as Pacific Music Festival, Bard Music Festival, Bologna Festival, and Ostrava Days. He has played under the baton of Fabio Luisi, Vasily Petrenko, Christoph Eschenbach, Peter Eötvös, Matthias Pintscher, and Zoltán Kocsis. In Europe he has performed with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. His wide repertoire includes pieces from the Baroque period to the contemporary. He is the first winner of the Fanny Mendelssohn Förderpreis. Appointed in 2019, he currently holds the position of professor of trumpet at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. Additionally, he performs with his brass quintet In Medias Brass. He performs on Adams instruments and has developed a new design for the C-trumpet together with the quintet. He also plays the Flugelhorn and Baroque trumpet. At the Ostrava Days 2015, he excelled in Richarda Ayres’s composition NONcerto for Trumpet.
