Miloslav Starosta

Prof. Miloslav Starosta was a Slovak pianist, pedagogue, music publicist, and organizer. The breadth of his activities in performance, pedagogy, writing, organization, and translation represents a significant contribution to the development of piano performance art in Slovakia.

For several decades he was actively engaged as a performer in both solo piano and chamber repertoire. As a soloist and chamber partner of leading figures of Slovak performance art, he appeared on concert stages in Germany, Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, and Switzerland, as well as on the then Czechoslovak domestic scene. He performed repeatedly at many festivals, including the Prague Spring International Music Festival (1975, 1986) and the Bratislava Music Festival (1973, 1976, 1985), among others. He was the initiator and member of chamber ensembles such as the Slovak Piano Trio (Miloslav Starosta – piano, Peter Michalica – violin, Juraj Alexander – cello), the Bratislava Piano Trio (Miloslav Starosta – piano, Pavol Heinz – violin, Jozef Sikora – cello), and the ensemble Musici da camera Bratislaviensis. He made recordings for domestic radio and television as well as for the OPUS publishing house. For 47 years, his life was closely connected with the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. From 1965 he taught piano at the Department of Keyboard Instruments (from 1980 as Associate Professor, from 1988 as Professor), while also holding official leadership positions as Vice-Dean (1980–1981) and Dean of the Faculty of Music (1981–1989). From 1991 he led courses within the supplementary pedagogical study programme for students and graduates of the faculty and became one of the founders of the study programme Piano Performance – Pedagogical Specialization.

In 2000 he founded and became head of the Methodological Centre of the Faculty of Music, which in 2003 was transformed into the Research Centre of the faculty. Many of his graduates established themselves on the concert stage and worked or continue to work at important Slovak professional educational institutions as well as abroad.

For several years he also taught externally at the State Conservatory in Bratislava.

Through his extensive publishing and translation activities focused on piano interpretation and piano pedagogy, he covered a vast historical and methodological spectrum. He was invited to lecture not only at universities (for example at the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno, 2003), but also within music festivals such as the Chamber Days of J. N. Hummel in Bratislava (2007) and at the international musicological conference In the Footsteps of Hummel (2008) in Bratislava. At the Academy of Performing Arts he founded the journal Bulletin HTF, published from 2002 to 2004, and from 2004 to 2008 he served as editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal Tempo, which continues to be published by the Faculty of Music to this day.