Artists – Piano
Pavel Kaspar
Ostrava native Pavel Kaspar began his piano studies at the age of six with Professor Zofie Fierlova. He later studied in the class of Professor Rudolf Macudzinski at the Bratislava Music Academy and Frantisek Rauch at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. In 1983, he moved to Germany, where he continued his studies under the direction of Professor Ludwig Hoffmann at the Munich Music Academy.
Kaspar won awards across Europe and received great acclaims in China, Mexico, Israel, the USA, and Canada. He made recordings for the Swiss company TUDOR and for Bayerischer Rundfunk.
He works with leading Czech and foreign orchestras and conductors such as Jiri Kout, Petr Altrichter, Rastislav Stur, Heiko Mathias Förster, Dirk Kaftan, Charles Olivieri-Munroe, Jan Talich, Alessandro Crudele, Jan Kucera, Libor Pesek and others. In solo recitals he always includes works of Czech music literature in his programmes.
He commenced the 2009/10 season with Czech orchestras – in Prague, Ostrava, Ceske Budejovice and Teplice. He will perform in Italy, Spain, Germany, Russia, Turkey, Mexico, and, for the third time in a row, China. In autumn 2009, he was the first Czech artist to appear at the Fazil Say Piano Festival in its ten year history.
Kaspar’s repertoire does not only include the works of Czech composers – Dvorak, Smetana, Martinu and Novak – but also the works of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, Scarlatti, Debussy, Ravel, Gershwin and many others.
The German daily Tz-Muenchen called him a “sensitive and clever interpreter of Debussy”. The American magazine Intune wrote that “Kaspar is a sensational pianist,” and compared him to Rudolf Firkusny.
For many years he has been actively involved in chamber music, working on joint projects with the Berlin Philharmonic Quartet, the Prague Quartet, cellist Michal Kanka (Prague Spring 2010), and flutist Roman Novotný. In the 1990, together with the cellist Jiri Hanousek, he founded Duo Moravia.
German composer Roland Leistner-Mayer composed a piano concert for Kaspar. This concert premiered in January 2001 and was performed with the Hofer Symphony Orchestra. Bayerischer Rundfunk published a recording of this concert in the spring of 2002.
Between 2002 and 2009 he recorded a 4-CD set of Bohuslav Martinu’s complete piano works. Interviews and reviews in the international press (Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Amadeus, The Classic Voice, Musica, Diapason) noticed how Kaspar expresses his love for his homeland through his lyrical phrasing - with “sweet expression of stillness” and “mastery and vibrancy in the most complex technical passages” (Tudor, Bayerischer Rundfunk). Martinu appears with other composers on Kaspar’s joint recording with Roman Novotny, flutist of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2009, he recorded another solo album at Rudolfinum, this time with the works of Haydn and Beethoven.
New CDs - „Pavel Kaspar plays Beethoven, Haydn“, "Roman Novotny - flute and Pavel Kaspar - piano - Poulenc, Martinu, Milhaud, Borne"