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unusual facts about Rudolf Firkušný



Artur Schnabel

Among Schnabel's many piano pupils were Gavin Williamson, Victor Babin, Clifford Curzon, Rudolf Firkušný, Adrian Aeschbacher, Lili Kraus, Leon Fleisher, Stefan Bardas, Carlo Zecchi, Claude Frank, Leonard Shure, Alan Bush, Vitya Vronsky, Nancy Weir, Konrad Wolff, Jascha Spivakovsky, Eunice Norton, Henry Jolles, Maria Curcio, Noel Mewton-Wood and radio personality Karl Haas.

Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts

Honorary doctorates have been awarded to the pianist Rudolf Firkušný (a native of Brno), the poet Ludvík Kundera, the playwright Václav Havel and the poet and actor Jiří Suchý, with the most recent going to the Czech-born British playwright Tom Stoppard.

Walter Hendl

An advocate of contemporary music, he conducted the premieres of Peter Mennin's Symphony No. 3 with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1947, Bohuslav Martinů's Piano Concerto No. 3 with Rudolf Firkušný and the Dallas Symphony in 1949, Villa-Lobos's Cello Concerto No. 2 with Aldo Parisot and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1954, and the American premiere of Kabalevsky's Requiem with students of the Eastman School in 1965.


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