Ilona Štěpánová-Kurzová

Ilona Štěpánová-Kurzová (Ilona Kurz) (born November 19, 1899 in Lviv , † September 25, 1975 in Prague ) was a Czech pianist and piano teacher.

She was one of the leading representatives of the Czech piano school. The music world knows her above all as a recognized and sought-after pedagogue who has trained a number of excellent interpreters. Her remarkable concert career is less well known today, although Ilona Stepanova was one of the artists of European importance in her time.

Life

Ilona Kurzová grew up as the only daughter of the piano teachers Vilém Kurz and Růžena Kurzová in a family of musicians. She learned to play the piano from her parents when she was a child. Before her tenth birthday, she made her concert debut in Lviv with Mozart's Coronation Concerto in D major with the Vienna Tonkünstler Orchestra under the leadership of Oskar Nedbal . This concert was repeated in Vienna and Prague.

From 1911 a lively concert activity followed, which lasted into the 1930s. Kurzová played countless concerts as a soloist with well-known orchestras and chamber ensembles (including the Bohemian String Quartet, the Ševčík Quartet and the Prague String Quartet ) at home and abroad (Poland, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands).

Her repertoire included eleven piano concertos and the major works of world literature of all stylistic epochs. She was best known for her interpretation of the compositions by Frédéric Chopin . From the Czech piano literature she played mainly works by Josef Suk , Vítězslav Novák , Bedřich Smetana , Antonín Dvořák , but also the compositions of contemporary Czech composers such as Karel Boleslav Jirák and Boleslav Vomáčka . She premiered a number of compositions, including Dvořák's Piano Concerto in G minor (1919 arranged by V. Kurz under the direction of Václav Talich ), Janáček's Concertino ( Brno , February 16, 1926) and Sergej Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 C major (Prague 1926).

The marriage with the Czech pianist, composer, pedagogue and musicologist Václav Štěpán (1924) meant for the pianist a further enrichment of her public activity, the turn to the interpretation of contemporary music and many independent concerts from literature for two pianos.

Stepanova's pedagogical talents were already noticeable in her adolescence, so it was natural that she would later devote her attention to this activity. After the death of her husband (1944) she took over his students at the master school of the Prague Conservatory , after the death of her father his students also moved on to her. From 1946 she became a professor at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague . Her students include Ivan Moravec , Mirka Pokorná , Ilja Hurník , Anna Machová , Zdeněk Hnát , Dagmar Baloghová , Zorka Lochmanová , Jaroslav Jiránek and Viera Janárčeková . She devoted the rest of her life to teaching.

Her son Pavel Štěpán continued the family tradition. The pianist took over from her father the respect for the will of the composer (exact interpretation of the score, respect for the composer's own style) as well as sonorous cantilenas and brilliant technical execution.

The Czech piano school enriched her with deep inner experience, color and plasticity of the touch nuances.

Textbook "Piano Technique"

Štěpánovás' collection of technical studies with methodological explanations ("Klaviertechnik", Prague 1979) is partly linked to the work "Technical Basics of Piano Playing" (Prague 1924) by her father V. Kurz, some of which are also cited. She breaks down the individual components of piano technology into the smallest details; She is based on examples from concert literature. Each of the eighteen chapters deals with a technical problem in progressively ordered exercises.

literature

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London 1980.
• Československý hudební slovník osob a institucí. Prague 1963.
• Českoslovenští koncertní umělci a komorní soubory. Prague 1964.
• Slovník české hudební kultury. Prague 1997.
• Lucie Kaucká: Profile života a díla Ilony Štěpánové-Kurzové. Bachelor thesis. Palacký University Olomouc, Olomouc 2000
• Zdeňka Böhmová-Zahradníčková: Vilém Short: Život, práce, methodika. SNKL, Prague 1954.

Web links

• llona Štěpánová-Kurzová in the Brno encyclopedia Czech