Handel’s Salon with Zsombor Tóth-Vajna and Gabriella Ács
Handel’s Salon brings music back into the rooms where Handel once lived, worked and entertained. Inspired by the concerts, gatherings and creative exchanges that filled his home, this series celebrates his music, his house and his enduring legacy.
Love, Loss and Redemption: An Evening with Handel
This intimate recital explores the extraordinary emotional range of George Frideric Handel through a selection of arias from his finest operas and oratorios. From the serene beauty of Ombra mai fu from Serse to the profound sorrow of Farewell, ye limpid springs and floods from the composer’s last oratorio, Jephta and the emotional intensity of Convey me to some peaceful shore from Alexander Balus, each work reveals Handel’s unrivalled ability to portray the deepest human emotions with remarkable immediacy.
Performed by soprano Gabriella Ács and harpsichordist Zsombor Tóth-Vajna, the programme returns these masterpieces to the intimate musical setting in which they were so often experienced during the eighteenth century. The dialogue between voice and harpsichord allows every nuance of Handel’s expressive language to emerge with clarity and elegance, revealing both the theatrical brilliance of his operas and the spiritual depth of his oratorios. This recital offers an opportunity to experience Handel’s music at its most direct, eloquent, and profoundly human.
Zsombor Tóth-Vajna
Zsombor, an early keyboard specialist and conductor, is one of the leading figures of the young musician generation in Hungary. He studied harpsichord and the organ at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest with Miklós Spányi, where he graduated with the highest honours, and where he is a guest teacher now. He continued his studies at the Conservatorium van and was taught by Menno van Delft (harpsichord, clavichord) and Richard Egarr (harpsichord, Amsterdam fortepiano), and on the organ by Jacques van Oortmerssen. He also holds a degree in medicine from Semmelweis University, Budapest.
He has given recitals in many European countries and in the United States of America as a soloist, conductor and as continuo in various orchestras. Zsombor is the founder and artistic director of Hungarian baroque orchestra Harmonia Caelestis (founded in 2015) in Budapest, and he is a passionate piano four-hands player with his partner and twin brother, Gergely under the name Piano e Forte Duo. Zsombor has recorded seven solo recordings for different labels.
Gabriella Ács
Gabriella Ács began her musical journey studying the flute and piano, and playing in a wind orchestra, yet her true ambition was always to become a singer. After finishing secondary school, she pursued advanced musical training at the Bartók Béla Conservatory of Music in Miskolc, graduating with honours in 2011, before continuing her studies at the University of Miskolc.
In 2014, Gabriella was admitted to the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in Budapest, where she studied at Master's level. She graduated with honours in 2018, earning her diploma in oratorio and art song performance, before continuing her postgraduate studies at the Academy.
Gabriella performs regularly as an oratorio and art song soloist. Alongside her performing career, she is a faculty member at the Nyíregyháza Secondary School of Arts, where she teaches solo voice, and at the Bartók Béla Faculty of Music at the University of Miskolc.
She is currently a supported talent of the Quintessence Master Academy, led by world-renowned soprano Erika Miklósa.
