Radoslav Kvapil

* 1934

  • “I visited an officer, well actually a manager of Pragokoncert in 1970. He was one of many managers. I told him: ’Will you please let me go abroad if I get invited? He looked at me and said: ’We will.’ When I was invited, they needed to make money. They took fifty percent from our honoraria. When I got a personal invitation, they gave me an exit visa. The only problem was to get invited. Which was incomparable with the Soviet Union. When they invited an artist there, Goskoncert said: ’We are going to decide which artist should represent the Soviet Union.’ And they could send someone else there. So it was much tougher there. The Švejk system worked and influenced it at least a little here after all. They needed to make money.”

  • “Political events were mainly in Brno very dramatic. You probably do not know that it existed. It was called The youth lead Brno. [Otto] Šling organized it. I remember the great excitement of people in the streets in 1948, 1949. A sea of blue shirts. ’We are building a new society.’ Everyone really believed it. The event The youth lead Brno was total anarchy. It consisted in young people leading the town for a week. I think they did not drive the trams but they definitely directed traffic at intersections. And my schoolmate who was around sixteen years old became a theatre director. He rehearsed a play as a director. And it was only luck that the main actress broke her leg and so the performance was cancelled because of it. Because if they had performed it, it would have been a big mess. It was really crazy period of time.”

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    Praha, 08.05.2021

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Ambassador for Czech piano music

Radoslav Kvapil in 2021
Radoslav Kvapil in 2021
zdroj: Post Bellum recording

A pianist, music teacher and Czech music promoter Radoslav Kvapil was born on 15 March 1934 in Brno. He went to private piano classes to an important musicologist Ludvík Kundera since he was six years old. After the Secondary-school leaving exam at grammar school in 1952 he studied at Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in the piano class of Ludvík Kundera. He started his musical career as a teacher at a conservatoire in Kroměřiž, however he soon made a breakthrough as a concert artist. He focused on piano works by Antoník Dvořák which made him famous abroad because he introduced so far little-known Dvořák´s piano compositions to a foreign audience. He recorded all the piano works by Dvořák for Supraphon, he later also discovered piano works by other Czech authors. He performed concerts in all the important world concert halls, such as London Royal Albert Hall, New York Carnegie Hall or Paris Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. In 1968, he participated in a group of independents called the Union of Czechoslovak Composers which was something like Club of Committed Independents. He also sat on the union‘s rehabilitation committee, which was supposed to correct the crimes committed against musicians in the 1950s. He considered immigrating to Sweden in 1969 but at last he decided to stay with his family in Czechoslovakia. In Bechyně in the 1970s, he started to organize unofficial, anti-regime Meetings of friends of chamber music inspired by masterclasses which he had experienced in Great Britain. He founded the International Dvořák Society in 1999 and he also founded and is a chairman of the Czech branch of European Piano Teachers Association.