Jan Vaclav (Hugo) Vorisek, pupil of his important fellow Bohemian composer Vaclav Jan Tomasek, later studied in Vienna with Hummel and won renown as a...

Jan Vaclav (Hugo) Vorisek, pupil of his important fellow Bohemian composer Vaclav Jan Tomasek, later studied in Vienna with Hummel and won renown as a virtuoso pianist. His compositions were admired by Beethoven, and he became a friend of Schubert. His short life witnessed a trajectory that took him from Classicism to the cusp of Romanticism, in which the currents of change are evident in his piano works. This second volume devoted to the music of Bohemian-born Jan Hugo Vorisek charts his rapid compositional development from the early Stammbuchblatt and Impromptu in B flat to the tone-painting of the Rondos, Op. 18. His early training with Vaclav Tomasek remained potent but so too did the new ethos of Beethoven. His character pieces share something of Schubert's harmonic ideas and suggest why Vorisek should be seen as a leading Viennese composer in the first quarter of the nineteenth-century.