MIROSLAV BEINHAUER’S UNIQUE PROJECT

Miroslav Beinhauer (*1993), the distinguished pianist from Ostrava, focuses on music of the 20th and 21st centuries. The young artist graduated from the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno, then he furthered his studies at the University of Music and the Performing Arts in Vienna in the studio of Prof. Jan Jiracek von Arnim and later at the Royal Conservatoire in Ghent, Belgium, under the guidance of Daan Vandewalle. Beinhauer has dozens of concerts to his credit. He is the only instrumentalist in the world able to play on the unique sixth-tone harmonium made for Alois Hába. This major composer of the 20th century became famous for his pioneering experiments with microintervallic music, while his large oeuvre using the standard system of semitones often tends to be neglected. Alois Hába was looking for a way to enrich traditional musical procedures and to arrive at a personal expressive language, and he succeeded brilliantly. On 11 April 2025, Supraphon will release a double album with Miroslav Beinhauer in the first recording of Alois Hába’s complete piano works composed using the ordinary system of semitones. The album will be released as a physical product and in the digital formats FLAC, MP3, and Hi-Res.

Hába has gone down in the history of 20th-century music as an experimenter. He studied the tonal principles of non-European music and developed his own theory of micro-intervallic music. However, his enthusiasm for microtonal music narrowed the perception of his creative legacy solely to its experimental component, although more than half of his works are compositions in the usual system of semitones. As he himself said, he was trying “to find the path from non-traditional training to artistically independent creative work with strongly alternative harmony and melody in order to arrive at a personal means of expression by way of Bach, Schumann, and Reger.” He achieved this goal in the Sonata, Op. 3, for which he received much praise from Schreker, while Vítězslav Novák “with condescending humour called it a ‘sonata for three hands’”. Erwin Schulhoff premiered the Two Grotesque Pieces in 1922 in Berlin alongside compositions by Satie, Casella, and Stravinsky, and according to a critic, “Hába’s compositions made a far more authentic impression than much that surrounded them.” After the Toccata quasi una fantasia (1931), Hába returned to writing piano music one last time 40 years later at the end of his life with his Six Moods.

Beinhauer’s enthusiasm for Hába’s music led to the premiere recording of his complete piano works. The double album, to be issued by Supraphon on 11 April 2025, is not only a celebration of Hába’s music, but also a reminder of its technical and formal challenges. As Miroslav Beinhauer noted: “Hába’s early compositions take Romanticism as their point of departure, while the works of his maturity go beyond tonality, and his late works are athematic. The element they all have in common, however, is a Moravian feeling for melody and rhythm.”