Pianist - Ivan Moravec (1930 - 2015). One of the greatest pianists of the last 70 years.
Born in Prague, he was introduced early to music by his father, who was a lawyer, but also an amateur musician and opera-lover. He took piano lessons from the age of seven and made his formal debut in a recital broadcast on the radio in 1946.
Moravec was very much a player of the old school: eschewing the virtuoso warhorses, he had a calm, unruffled, almost phlegmatic posture at the keyboard, in part a matter of natural predisposition and in part the result of a youthful ice-skating injury that forced him to stop playing at the age of 18 when the symptoms recurred. They subsequently disappeared again, but as he himself noted: “Perhaps if I had been completely healthy, with muscles like a bull, my style would be absolutely different.” As it was, he developed a style of unaffected simplicity and a warm, rich sonority based on iridescent tone and precisely calibrated weighting, with generous pedalling: “Whenever I can combine sound to achieve tremendously long sonorities, I do it,” he said. His concern for tonal quality led him to carry a black leather satchel containing tools to remedy unbalanced keys or hammers.
11 сен 2024
