Rudolf Firkusny
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Rudolf Firkusny (Czech Rudolf Firkušný, IPA: [ˈrʊdolf ˈfɪrkʊʃni:]) (11 February 1912-19 July 1994) was a Czech-American pianist with an elegant style. Firkušný studied with the composers Leoš Janáček and Josef Suk, and the pianists Vilém Kurz, Alfred Cortot and Artur Schnabel. He began performing on the continent of Europe in the 1920s, and made his debuts in London in 1933 and New York in 1938. He escaped the Nazis, settled in New York and became a US citizen.
Firkušný was one of the great concert pianists of the 20th century. He had a broad repertoire and performed with skill the works of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. However, he became known especially for his performances of the Czech composers Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, Leoš Janáček, and Bohuslav Martinů who wrote a number of works for him. He recorded the complete piano works of Janáček and championed Dvořák's only piano concerto. He was also a devoted chamber player and among his most prominent partners figure cellists Pierre Fournier and Janos Starker, violinists Nathan Milstein and Erika Morini, violist William Primrose or the Julliard String Quartet.
Firkusny taught at the Juilliard School in New York, and in Aspen, Colorado. After the fall of the communist regime in his homeland (the "Velvet Revolution" of 1989), Firkusny returned to Czechoslovakia to perform for the first time after more than 40 years away. He retained his remarkable talents well into his later years and, for example, played a full Dvořák-Janáček-Brahms-Beethoven sonata recital in Prague on 18 May 1992 together with the violinist Josef Suk, the grandson of his teacher by the same name. Along with Ivan Moravec and Antonín Kubálek, Firkusny stands in the front row of the Czech masters of the piano.
