Leonie Karatas (piano)

Daniel Barenboim attested to the young pianist Leonie Karatas "unheard-of musicality" when she played for him at the age of 14 - today the musician is one of the "great up-and-coming piano talents." (NDR Kulturredaktion)

Leonie Karatas’ debut album is dedicated to the solo work of the Czech composer Vitezslava Kaprálová and is the prelude to a series of further recordings which will be dedicated to the work of individual female composers.

Vitezslava Kaprálová was a Czech composer and conductor. Highly talented and self-confident, she developed her own style of composition at an early age. At the age of 15 she began her studies in Brno, when she composed the sonata Appassionata she was 18 years old, and at 22 she graduated with honours in Prague.

After her first appearances as a conductor, she went to Paris on a scholarship to take further composition lessons with Bohuslav Martinů. Paris became an exile with the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Shortly after her marriage in April 1940, she was evacuated from there to the south of France, where she died aged 25 in Montpellier on 16 June - of what is still not clear. Her impressive oeuvre was almost forgotten, which is why the young pianist Leonie Karatas is dedicating this album of her solo works for piano to her.

Leonie Karatas about the project:

Vitezslava Kaprálová captivates with her imaginative and courageous compositional style, a depth and maturity in her early works, which do not suggest a young woman, but one who looks back on a long and experienced life and sums it up. For all her maturity, she never loses a certain twinkle in her eye, her youthful enthusiasm, a moment of lightness and confidence that transcends any suffering. It is worth dedicating not only one album to this composer, but many years of digging deeper and deeper, in the desire to be able to contemplate her cosmos of colors in all its complexity