The Czech Philharmonic is the foremost Czech orchestra and has long held a place among the most esteemed representatives of Czech culture on the international scene. The beginning of its rich history is linked to the name of Antonín Dvořák, who on 4 January 1896 conducted the ensemble’s inaugural concert. Although the orchestra performs a broad range of the core international repertoire, it is sought out most often for its superb interpretations of the classics by the great Czech composers in a tradition built up by great conductors (Talich, Kubelík, Ančerl, Neumann, and Bělohlávek). In 2008 the prestigious magazine Gramophone ranked it among the twenty best orchestras of the world. One of the orchestra’s most important recent projects has recording Tchaikovsky’s complete orchestral works for the Decca Label with Semyon Bychkov conducting. Since the inception of the Dvořák Prague Festival, the Czech Philharmonic has been its resident orchestra, and since 2018 it has been a holder of the Antonín Dvořák Prize for promoting and popularising Czech classical music abroad and in the Czech Republic.

Kirill Gerstein, who turns forty this year, is a pianist of Russian origin living in the United States of America and Germany, where he teaches at the Musikhochschule in Stuttgart. As a child, he was inclined primarily towards jazz, which he taught himself to play by listening to his parents’ extensive collection of recordings. Thanks to his extraordinary talent, he was admitted to the renowned Berklee College of Music in Boston at the age of just fourteen to study jazz, making him the youngest student in the institution’s history. At age fifteen, however, he decided definitively for the classical piano, which he then studied at the Manhattan School of Music under Prof. Solomon Mikowsky. Thanks to his technical mastery and his wide range of styles, Gerstein is today one of the world’s most sought-after pianists. He appears regularly in solo recitals and in collaboration with renowned orchestras around the world on the most prestigious stages (Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, London’s Wigmore Hall, the Zurich Tonhalle, the Salzburg Festival). For his recording of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, he won the prestigious ECHO Klassik award in 2015.

Semyon Bychkov is one of today’s most sought-after conductors because of his clear opinions on interpretation and his emphasis on beauty of sound. He was born in 1952 in what was then called Leningrad, and he graduated from the conservatoire there. After emigrating from the Soviet Union to the United States in the 1970s, he soon earned an outstanding international reputation. He has been a long-term collaborator with the world’s best orchestras, including the philharmonic orchestras in Vienna, Berlin, and Munich, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic. He also devotes himself intensively to opera, conducting at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Vienna State Opera, the Teatro Real Madrid, La Scala in Milan, and the Opéra national de Paris, where he has conducted productions of operas ranging from Mozart’s Don Giovanni to Strauss’s Elektra. He also has a vast discography, including highly acclaimed recordings of Verdi’s Requiem and Wagner’s Lohengrin and the complete symphonies of Brahms. Since the 2018/19 season, he has been the chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic.