Pianist and harpsichordist Débora Halász has performed and recorded a wide variety of music, from Baroque to contemporary, from South American to Eastern European and Russian. She has often performed as part of Duo Halász with her husband, guitarist Franz Halász. Débora Halász was born in São Paulo, Brazil, around 1965. Halász is her married name, but she also has Hungarian background in her own family. She took up the piano at age six. At ten, she won a contest and entered Brazil's Magdalena Tagliaferro Academy as the school's youngest student. Halász studied later with Beatriz Balzi and Myrian Dauelsberg and made her debut at 15 with the São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra. Halász kept her career options open, earning a law degree at São Paulo University. An honor for best soloist of the year from the Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte when she was 19, for a performance of Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30, helped put her on a path toward a concert career. With the help of a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) scholarship, Halász traveled to Germany in 1989 for studies at the Musikhochschule Köln, and she has continued to live in Germany since then. She married Franz Halász in 1991, and the pair formed the successful Duo Halász in 1993. As a soloist, Halász has appeared at major festivals and concert series in Europe and South America. Later in her career, she took up the harpsichord, playing a copy, made for her, of a 1734 Haas workshop instrument. She has performed and recorded the music of harpsichord composer Carlos Seixas. Issuing albums on the BIS and Naxos labels, Halász has been especially noteworthy for her recording career. On BIS, she released a cycle of the piano music of Heitor Villa-Lobos. Her 2015 album Alma Brasileira won a 2015 Latin Grammy award. The Duo Halász released a recording of Beethoven's music for guitar and piano on Naxos in 2020. Halász teaches at the Hochschule für Musik Nürnberg and the Hochschule für Musik und Theater, Munich. ~ James Manheim