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In the 1990s, Hungarian composer-pianist Ervin Nyiregyházi’s personal archive was donated posthumously to the Takasaki Art Center College (TACC), Japan. While the TACC kept adding materials to the archive over years, unfortunately, the contents of the archive had not been disclosed to outsiders in the years that followed. Although Tomoyuki Sawado (webmaster of fugue.us) and his collaborator Kevin Bazzana (author of Lost Genius) made a series of attempts together to access the TACC archive in the early 2000s, the outcome was not fruitful.

In 2012, the TACC was closed because of financial difficulties, and the archive was seized by the creditors. After years of negotiations, the ownership of the archive was transferred to Sawado/Sonetto Classics in the summer of 2016.

The sizeable collection included more than a hundred reel-to-reel tapes (including a number of masters), unpublished documentary film materials, over 2,000 compositions, hundreds of photographs, letters, booklets, printed scores, and more. We have been making an effort to share the treasure with the world-----our first project derived from the archive, Nyiregyházi Live, vol. 1:The Century Club of California, 1972, was released on April 8th, 2017 (the 30th anniversary from his death) and the second album Nyiregyházi Live, vol. 2: Forest Hill Clubhouse, 1973 / Last Recordings, 1984, was released in October, 2020. The third album, Nyiregyházi Live. 3: Old First Church, 1973 is being released on May 6th, 2023, which marks the 50th anniversary of the historic recital.

In addition to Sawado's personal collection and Bazzana's materials assembled during his Lost Genius research, Ricardo Hernandez (one of Nyiregyházi's closest friends) and Jun Kinoshita (JK Arts) have also contributed to enrich the archival contents. Still, we have been looking for the following materials, all of which have been missing......

1. Reel-to-reel tape (original): Old First Church concert, 1973
2. Terry McNeill's Cassette tape (original): Old First Church concert, 1973
3. Cassette tape: Moonlight Sonata (1st movement), 1980
4. Acetate disc: Liszt E-flat major concerto, 1935
5. Acetate disc: Liszt Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este, 1938
6. Broadcast recording: All-Liszt program aired by Norwegian Radio in 1939
7. Cassette tape: Liszt B-minor Sonata around 1960
8. Film soundtrack: Lummox (1930)

Sawado's Nyiregyházi projects are endorsed by Mattheus Smits, the president of the International Ervin Nyiregyházi Foundation in the Netherlands, which represents the Nyiregyházi's estate.