An Overview.
Toni Koves-Steiner, pioneering concert virtuoso of the cimbalom, passed away on April 2nd, 2007. She was eighty-eight years old.
She had a successful career as a soloist in nightclubs when she was recruited by Leopold Stokowski in the fifties to record Bartok’s First Rhapsody with the great Josef Szigeti and Stokowski’s own arrangements of Liszt Rhapsodies. From there she took on the scores by Stravinsky and Kodaly that called for cimbalom. At that time these parts were being performed on piano. She made the definitive recordings of these works with Stravinsky and Robert Craft, which have recently been reissued. After she began concertizing, Peter Maxwell Davies, Samuel Barber and Pierre Boulez wrote new music for the instrument.
In a long career she played and recorded with most of the major U.S. symphonies and virtually all the great American conductors of her time, including Eugene Ormandy, Leonard Bernstein, Fritz Reiner, Tibor Serly, Dimitri Mitroupolos, George Szell, Erich Leinsdorf and many others. Later, she inspired and mentored percussionists who now play the instrument. She also continued to do the solo and ensemble work she loved in clubs and restaurants.
She had a successful career as a soloist in nightclubs when she was recruited by Leopold Stokowski in the fifties to record Bartok’s First Rhapsody with the great Josef Szigeti and Stokowski’s own arrangements of Liszt Rhapsodies. From there she took on the scores by Stravinsky and Kodaly that called for cimbalom. At that time these parts were being performed on piano. She made the definitive recordings of these works with Stravinsky and Robert Craft, which have recently been reissued. After she began concertizing, Peter Maxwell Davies, Samuel Barber and Pierre Boulez wrote new music for the instrument.
In a long career she played and recorded with most of the major U.S. symphonies and virtually all the great American conductors of her time, including Eugene Ormandy, Leonard Bernstein, Fritz Reiner, Tibor Serly, Dimitri Mitroupolos, George Szell, Erich Leinsdorf and many others. Later, she inspired and mentored percussionists who now play the instrument. She also continued to do the solo and ensemble work she loved in clubs and restaurants.
