Prague Spring Announces the Programme of the Rudolf Firkušný Piano Festival 2025
From 8 to 13 November 2025, the Rudolf Firkušný Piano Festival will take place at Prague’s Rudolfinum for the thirteenth time under the auspices of Prague Spring. Making their festival debuts will be Jan Lisiecki, Karel Košárek, and jazz pianist Jiří Levíček. A recital by Yulianna Avdeeva will commemorate this year’s important anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich, and one of the world’s most original pianists, Arcadi Volodos, will return to Prague with works by Schubert, Schumann, and Liszt.
“Last year’s nearly sold-out edition once again demonstrated how popular the piano recital genre is with Czech audiences. This year, we can look forward to another fascinating journey through the world’s piano repertoire, ranging from the Baroque to 20th-century music, featuring both grand Romantic works and intimate miniature forms. We will witness a dialogue across styles and generations. Personally, I am especially looking forward to Jan Lisiecki’s recital. His concert at Prague Spring on 23 May with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra is completely sold out. The Firkušný Festival offers the chance to hear his artistry once again in November, in an entirely exceptional repertoire,” says Prague Spring Festival Director Pavel Trojan. “The Rudolf Firkušný Piano Festival 2025 will, in a certain way, be dominated by the prelude form, which in every stylistic period has given composers space to express their most intimate emotions. However, we will also experience an American evening with Karel Košárek and Jiří Levíček, culminating in Dave Brubeck’s jazz composition Points on Jazz for two pianos, as well as a performance of Robert Schumann’s and Franz Liszt’s virtuoso works by the legendary Arcadi Volodos. This strong lineup of pianists ranks the Firkušný Festival among top-tier international musical events,” adds Prague Spring Programme Director Josef Třeštík.
8/11 Jan Lisiecki
For the first time, the festival will welcome thirty-year-old Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki, performing a recital titled Preludes. “I enjoy programmes that balance the familiar with the unfamiliar,” says Lisiecki. “In the first half, I will present different composers’ approaches to the prelude form, while in the second, I will offer a cohesive cycle of Chopin’s Preludes, Op. 28. What makes this programme unique for me is that even the prelude form, in its natural state and on its own – without a following fugue – can lead from somewhere to something. Each piece in the programme has been selected to introduce the one that follows,” explains Lisiecki. Among the composers he will present in the first part of the evening are Johann Sebastian Bach, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Henryk Górecki, Olivier Messiaen, and Karol Szymanowski. Lisiecki’s Preludes programme has already enjoyed success in the Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall in New York, Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, and BOZAR in Brussels. In Prague, this youngest-ever recipient of the Gramophone Young Artist Award, who has been a leading face of the Deutsche Grammophon label since the age of fifteen, will present it on 8 November 2025 in the Dvořák Hall of the Rudolfinum.
10/11 Yulianna Avdeeva
The second evening of the festival will be dedicated exclusively to the works of Dmitri Shostakovich. Through this exceptional programme, the festival will also commemorate fifty years since the composer’s passing, which falls this August. Yulianna Avdeeva, winner of the Chopin Competition in Warsaw, will perform a selection from the iconic cycle The 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87, which Shostakovich composed at the height of the Stalinist era, between 1950 and 1951. He was inspired to write the cycle by Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, Books One and Two. “Still, I do not want to compare these two cycles, because 24 Preludes and Fugues is pure Shostakovich,” says Avdeeva. Only a handful of pianists worldwide have this complete cycle – one of the most important piano cycles of the 20th century – in their repertoire, Avdeeva among them. This year, she will present it in venues including the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, and the Palau de la Música in Barcelona. A selection from the cycle will be performed in Prague in the Dvořák Hall of the Rudolfinum on 10 November 2025.
12/11 Karel Košárek & Jiří Levíček
The third evening of the festival will be dedicated to American 20th-century music, spanning from the Impressionist-tinged cycle 3 Tone-Pictures, Op. 5, by Charles Tomlinson Griffes, inspired in part by Yeats’ poem The Lake Isle of Inisfree, to Copland’s famous El Salón México in Leonard Bernstein’s piano arrangement, Samuel Barber’s Piano Sonata, and the electrifying Virtuoso Études after Gershwin, composed by one of America’s earliest piano virtuosos, Earl Wild. The Czech pianist Karel Košárek, winner of the Walter Naumburg Competition in New York (1997), will showcase his mastery in these pieces. In the second half of the programme, he will be joined by jazz pianist Jiří Levíček, winner of the Phillips International Jazz Competition (2009), for a performance of Dave Brubeck’s Points on Jazz for two pianos. An artist with extensive experience in the American jazz scene, Levíček spent several years as a member of the One O’Clock Lab Band, a group nominated multiple times for the Grammy Awards. Czech audiences know him primarily from his work with the Robert Balzar Trio and the B-Side Band. The evening, subtitled “God Bless American Jazz”, will take place in the Dvořák Hall of the Rudolfinum on 12 November.
13/11 Arcadi Volodos
The festival’s closing night will belong to one of today’s most original pianists, Arcadi Volodos. He previously performed at the Firkušný Festival in 2021, when he stunned audiences with his interpretations of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann. For his return to Prague, he will once again open his recital with Schubert, this time performing his penultimate piano sonata, D.959, composed in the last year of his life. This will be followed by Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6, a cycle of dances he began composing one week after his secret engagement to Clara Wieck in the summer of 1837. Schumann attributed the composition to his dual artistic alter egos, “Florestan” and “Eusebius”. The recital will culminate in Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 13 in A Minor in Volodos’ own arrangement, in which he merges introspective depth in musical structure with breathtaking virtuosity. Arcadi Volodos will conclude the 13th edition of the Rudolf Firkušný Piano Festival in the Dvořák Hall of the Rudolfinum on 13 November 2025.
Festival Partners
Partners of the 13th edition of the Rudolf Firkušný Piano Festival are the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the City of Prague. The Official Vehicle of the festival is Mercedes-Benz Česká republika.
Ticket Sales
Ticket sales for the 13th edition of the Rudolf Firkušný Piano Festival will begin on Wednesday, 19 March, at 11:00 AM. Tickets will be available for purchase online at www.firkusny.cz. Until 3 June, an Early Bird discount of 20 % applies to individual ticket purchases. A subscription ticket for all four recitals is also available with a 30% discount.
