Karel Košárek & Jiří Levíček

What happens when a classical pianist with a love for American music joins forces with a jazzman? You’ll find out at the concert for which Karel Košárek, laureate of a series of international competitions and regular piano partner of Magdalena Kožená, enlists the collaboration of Jiří Levíček, leading jazz musician with experience performing in the USA. Košárek opens the first half of the evening with Copland’s popular piece El Salón México, whose orchestral form was arranged for piano in a highly original way by no less a figure than Leonard Bernstein. This will be followed by Impressionist pieces by Charles Griffes entitled Three Tone-Pictures, and the first half of the concert will end with one of the most important works in American piano literature, Piano Sonata by Samuel Barber. Košárek will begin the second half with virtuoso etudes which Earl Wild based on the motifs of famous songs by George Gershwin. Both pianists will then team up in the half-hour suite for two pianos Points on Jazz, which combines classical and jazz forms, such as blues, ragtime, chorale and fugue. Dave Brubeck wrote the work in the early 1960s, originally as a ballet suite.