Marcell Szabó was born in Budapest in 1987. He started playing the piano at 8. He began his studies it the Kálmán Nádasdy School of Arts in Budafok as a pupil of Márta Batke. At this time he acquainted with piano teacher Katalin Csáky who has been his music mentor since then. Not more than one year later he played Haydn’s Piano Concerto in D major in the Esterházy Palace at Fertőd. From then on, he won the first prizes of the annual piano competitions arranged for the Budapest Music Schools year by year.

In 1999, he enrolled to the Special School for Young Talents of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music and was accepted to the class of Gábor Eckhardt. In 2004, he won the second prize of the III. International Piano Competition named after Zlatko Grgosević in Zagreb, Croatia (no first prize was awarded). He won first prize in his age category when he participated in the I. International Chopin Piano Competition in Budapest the same year. In 2005, he was awarded the Sári Bíró memorial prize as the best pupil elected from those of the Special School for Young Talents of the Liszt Academy. In 2006, he was allowed to start his studies at the Piano Faculty of the Liszt Academy, where he became the student of András Kemenes and György Nádor. In 2007, he was awarded the first prize in the XIV. Andor Földes Piano Contest arranged within the Academy of Music. He was granted a special prize in Nagoya, Japan in 2008 for his interpretation of Franz Liszt’s piano concerto in E-flat major in the course of the finals of the IV. Nagoya Piano Competition. He then won the third prize at the IV. International Bartók Piano Competition held in Szeged (Hungary) in the spring of 2010 where he also collected a special prize awarded for the best interpretation of the contemporary music.  He was then accepted as a guest student in the Brussels Royal Academy in the academic year of 2011/2012 where he studied under the tutorship of Jan Michiels. He graduated in Budapest in 2012 and then in the same year he was granted the third prize among the adult age category at the V. International Chopin Piano Competition in Budapest where he also collected the special prize awarded for him as the best Liszt interpreter.  In the same year, he enrolled to the Doctoral School of the Liszt Academy. In 2014 he was awarded at three competitions, altogether, that are the following: first prize of the VI. International Bartók Piano Competition and he won two special prizes of he same event as he was granted one by the orchestra and another one as the best performer of the contemporary music; and then he collected the third prize at the XXXIII. Delia Steinberg International Piano Competition in Madrid, Spain and the first prize at the XVI. Internation Ile de france Piano Competition in Paris, France which success won him several invitations for concerting in France, too. In the year of 2015, a special committee chaired by Zoltán Kocsis elected him to be one of the musicians sponsored by Carreer Office of the Academy of Music. In Transsylvania, he won the second prize of the XX. Carl Filtsch Piano Competition in the same year. At the end of 2015 he was awarded with Junior Prima Prize which is one of the most prestigeous award a young musician can achieve. In 2016,2017,2018 he was given the Annie Fischer Musical Scholarship. In 2018 he founded the Russian Music Festival in Budapest. The festival's focus is on well-known and on rarely played classical pieces by russian composers. The festival's huge succes led to the II. Russian Music Festival in 2019.In 2019 he was awarded with the Cziffra-Festival Talent Prize.

 

So far, he participated in several masterclasses, including the ones held by such pianist as Dmitri Bashkirov, Zoltán Kocsis, Imre Rohmann, Gergely Bogányi, Sándor Falvai, Balázs Szokolay, Jan Michiels, Gottlieb Wallisch, Maurizio Moretti and already played in concert halls not only in Hungary but also in Vienna, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Dortmund,  Paris, Madrid, Nagoya, Hamburg, Brussels and Luxembourg.