Tomáš Jamník is one of the most prominent cellists on the Czech performance scene. He has been devoting himself to cello playing since the age of five, and after graduating from the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague under the tutelage of Prof. Josef Chuchro, he furthered his education in Leipzig and Berlin. At the age of twenty-one, he won the 2006 Prague Spring International Competition, where he also received several special prizes. In 2010 he won a competition that earned him a place at the renowned Karajan Academy in Berlin, at which he appeared as a member of the Berlin Philharmonic and of various chamber music groups of philharmonic players. Since 2011 he has been collaborating with such top musicians as Simon Rattle, Reinhard Goebel, and Leif Ove Andsnes. Together with the violinist Jan Fišer and the pianist Ivo Kahánek, he is a founding member of the Dvořák Trio. For the Supraphon label, he has recorded the complete works of Antonín Dvořák for cello and orchestra including the virtually unknown Concerto in A Major in a special arrangement based on an orchestration by Jarmil Burghauser. He performed it at the 2019 Dvořák Prague Festival.

The beginnings of the artistic career of the British conductor James Judd are connected with his studies at London’s Trinity College. As one of the school’s exceptionally successful graduates, he was appointed as an assistant to the legendary conductor Lorin Maazel. His wealth of artistic activities has included collaborations with renowned orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the London Symphony Orchestra. His chief domain as a conductor has been the music of British and American composers and in particular Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and George Gershwin. Besides his concert activities, he has been a frequent guest of opera houses (English National Opera) and festivals (Wexford Festival and the Glyndebourne Opera Festival), where he has conducted productions of the operas Il trovatore, La traviata, Rigoletto, The Barber of Seville, and The Marriage of Figaro. He has made a number of recordings for the Decca, EMI, and Philips labels. For his recording of Mahler’s First Symphony, he won the prestigious Diapason d’Or. Since the 2017/18 concert season, he has been the chief conductor of the Slovak Philharmonic.

For many decades, the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra has been a universal symphonic ensemble with a wide range of repertoire including concert music and opera, and it is one of the most important and oldest orchestras in the Czech Republic. Among the permanent or guest conductors to have collaborated with the orchestra have been Václav Talich, Karel Ančerl, Václav Neumann, Vladimír Válek, and Charles Mackerras. Its present chief conductor is Alexander Liebreich. A number of foreign composers have conducted their own music with the orchestra, including Sergei Prokofiev and Aram Khachaturian. The orchestra has always devoted itself intensively to recording, and it has to its credit the making of audio recordings of many Czech classics that are not a usual part of the repertoire. This is not the orchestra’s first appearance at the Dvořák Prague Festival: back in 2014 it took part in the festival’s world premiere complete performance of Dvořák’s first opera Alfred with its original German libretto.