Biography (read more)
Radoslav Kvapil was born in Brno on 15 March 1934. From the age of six he took private piano lessons with Ludvík Kundera, who had studied composition with Leoš Janáček and is described as the composer’s closest pupil and follower; Kundera taught at the Brno Conservatory from 1922 to 1941 and became the first rector of the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in 1948. Kvapil went on to study at the Academy’s music faculty, completing his piano studies in 1957, so that his knowledge of Janáček came from a first-hand source.
He taught at the Prague Conservatory from 1963 to 1973, and later held teaching engagements at the Juilliard School, the Royal Academy of Music in London and at American universities. As a concert pianist he has played in some fifty countries, including at Carnegie Recital Hall and the Royal Albert Hall.
In 1999 he founded the International Dvořák Society, and from 2008 to 2009 he served as European president of the European Piano Teachers Association. France’s Ministry of Culture made him a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004.
Kvapil is the leading recorded advocate of Czech piano music. Between 1967 and 1969 he made the first complete recording of Dvořák’s piano works, for Supraphon, and he has also recorded the complete Janáček piano music for Panton and a second Janáček cycle made in Paris in 1989. Between 1993 and 1996 he assembled an eight-disc Anthology of Czech Piano Music covering Dvořák, Smetana, Martinů and others, and his recorded repertoire extends to Voříšek, Novák and Suk.
That work amounts to a systematic mapping of a national repertoire that had not previously been surveyed on record, and it is the reason his name is attached to Czech piano music generally rather than to any single composer. His direct line of descent from Janáček through Ludvík Kundera gives his Janáček in particular an unusual claim to authority.
Later in his career he turned considerable attention to Chopin, appearing at the Chopin festival at Nohant in France, and recording the Études and the complete Ballades and Impromptus.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radoslav_Kvapil
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radoslav_Kvapil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludv%C3%ADk_Kundera_(musicologist)