Ivan Moravec was born in Prague on 9 November 1930. His first enthusiasm was opera, which he attended as a child with his father, an amateur pianist and singer who helped him sight-read and sing through the scores. He studied with Erna Grünfeld, niece of Alfred Grünfeld, entered the Prague Conservatory at twenty and went on to the Academy of Performing Arts to work with Ilona Štěpánová-Kurzová, daughter of Vilém Kurz; in 1957 Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli heard him in Prague and invited him to his master classes at Arezzo that summer. He died in Prague on 27 July 2015.

A tape of a Prague recital circulating in America in the late 1950s brought him to the attention of Connoisseur Society, a small audiophile label that negotiated with the Czech authorities to engage him; he travelled to New York in 1962 to make the first of many records for it, and in 1964 George Szell invited him to play with the Cleveland Orchestra, which opened his international career. His Chopin and Debussy are the recordings he is best known for, and his concerto repertoire ran to more than a dozen works by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Ravel, Prokofiev and Franck. He is heard playing part of Mozart’s Concerto in E flat in the 1984 film Amadeus, and was known for a fastidious attention to the regulation of the instruments he played.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Moravec
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1091924