Voříšek: Complete Piano Works

At the time of his death in Vienna, the Czech composer Jan Václav Hugo Voříšek (1791 - 1825) was only 34 years old. Apart from studies of composition (with Tomášek in Prague, and with Hummel in Vienna), he had also obtained schooling in Philosophy and Law. In Vienna, where he settled in 1813, his talent was duly recognized, as in 1822 he became organist to the imperial court, a post which ranked him definitively alongside the foremost celebrities of Vienna's music life. The compositional legacy he left behind is not particularly extensive but in terms of artistic value confirms his status as a major composer. His style straddles the borderline between the Classical and the Romantic. There, his keyboard output - whose virtually complete collection (except for two or three unimportant occasional pieces) is being presented here in digital format - already quite obviously augurs the advent of the Romantic era. The honourable task of interpreting the sum of Voříšek's works for the piano was taken up here with success by Radoslav Kvapil, a leading specialist on Czech piano production, whose previous Supraphon projects have included among other titles complete sets of piano works of Leoš Janáček and Antonín Dvořák.

The greatest talent of Czech music of the pre-Smetanian era.