Rudolf Firkušný Piano Festival — Karel Košárek & Jiří Levíček

The third evening of the Rudolf Firkušný Piano Festival will be dedicated to American 20th-century music, spanning from the Impressionist-tinged cycle 3 Tone-Pictures, Op. 5, by Charles Tomlinson Griffes, inspired in part by Yeats’ poem The Lake Isle of Inisfree, to Copland’s famous El Salón México in Leonard Bernstein’s piano arrangement, Samuel Barber’s Piano Sonata, and the electrifying Virtuoso Études after Gershwin, composed by one of America’s earliest piano virtuosos, Earl Wild. The Czech pianist Karel Košárek, winner of the Walter Naumburg Competition in New York (1997), will showcase his mastery in these pieces. In the second half of the programme, he will be joined by jazz pianist Jiří Levíček, winner of the Phillips International Jazz Competition (2009), for a performance of Dave Brubeck’s Points on Jazz for two pianos. An artist with extensive experience in the American jazz scene, Levíček spent several years as a member of the One O’Clock Lab Band, a group nominated multiple times for the Grammy Awards. Czech audiences know him primarily from his work with the Robert Balzar Trio and the B-Side Band. The evening, subtitled “God Bless American Jazz”, will take place in the Dvořák Hall of the Rudolfinum on 12 November.

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