Czech Chamber Music Society • Martinů Voices

The Martinů Voices chamber choir was founded in 2010. While its main artistic focus has been on top-quality interpretation of chamber choral works of the 19th through the 21st centuries, their repertoire also covers music of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical periods. The ensemble is made up of professional singers working under the direction of the choirmaster Lukáš Vasilek.

The choir is a regular guest at the Czech Republic’s major music festivals including Prague Spring, Smetana’s Litomyšl, Dvořák Prague, Strings of Autumn, the Saint Wenceslas Music Festival, and Lípa Musica. They mostly perform concerts in their own series, but they have likewise been involved in a number of joint projects with Czech and foreign orchestras and conductors. In 2014, they joined with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and Jiří Bělohlávek in a production of Bohuslav Martinůʼs opera What Men Live By. That particular collaboration earned them a nomination for the prestigious International Opera Award (2015). Another major achievement for the choir was their concert appearance at the 2016 Dvořák Prague Festival alongside the Tallis Scholars, a prominent British ensemble. A year later, the choir joined with the Bang on a Can All-Stars in giving the premiere of the cantata Anthracite Fields by the American composer Julia Wolfe at the festival Strings of Autumn.

Recordings made by Martinů Voices with a selection of choral music by Jan Novák, Bohuslav Martinů (Supraphon 2014, 2018), and Benjamin Britten (Animal Music 2023) have won extraordinary acclaim. Their album of madrigals by Bohuslav Martinů won a Diapason dʼOr from the important French music magazine Diapason, and the UK’s prestigious magazine Gramophone honoured the recording as the Editor’s Choice, the journal’s highest rating.

Lukáš Vasilek studied conducting and musicology. Since 2007, he has been the chief choirmaster of the Prague Philharmonic Choir (PPC). Most of his artistic work with them involves rehearsing and performing a cappella repertoire and preparing them to perform in large-scale cantatas, oratorios, and operatic projects in collaboration with world-famous conductors and orchestras (Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, Israel Philharmonic, Kyiv Symphony Orchestra, etc.).

In addition to leading the PPC, he is active in a wide range of artistic projects, most notably in collaboration with the vocal ensemble Martinů Voices, which he founded in 2010. As a conductor and choirmaster, he appears on numerous recordings for major international labels, including Decca Classics and Supraphon. In recent years, he has focused systematically on recording the choral music of Bohuslav Martinů. His recordings have received extraordinary worldwie acclaim and have earned awards from prestigious publications such as Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, and Diapason.

Kateřina Englichová, winner of a Prague Classic Award, is a performer of renown all around Europe. She works with important artists and ensembles in this country and abroad, and she is invited to sit on juries at international competitions (including the Israel Harp Competition, the world’s most prestigious competition for harpists).

She studied at the Prague Conservatoire and the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia; in the summer of 2017 she completed her post-graduate studies at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin. She is now the professor of harp at the Prague Conservatoire and leads masterclasses in this country and abroad (USA, Canada, UK, Hong Kong etc.).

She also devotes herself to contemporary music and has premiered a number of works, including some written for her. She has recorded more than 40 CDs (including the Ceremony of Carols by B. Britten with the Kühn Children’s Choir and Jiří Chvála). Last year she recorded three “Covid” CDs; she will be celebrating the release of the first of them with the soprano Kateřina Kněžíková at the festival Smetana’s Litomyšl in June 2022.

A graduate of Prague’s Academy of Performing Arts and of a year-long study visit at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg, since 2006 Daniela Valtová Kosinová has been the solo organist and principal keyboard player of the Prague Symphony Orchestra. As a soloist, she collaborates with other Czech and foreign orchestras and appears regularly with the Czech Philharmonic, with which she has twice toured the USA. Her first performance with this orchestra of the Glagolitic Mass, to which she “found a path of her own”, took place at Vienna’s Musikverein under the baton of Jiří Bělohlávek, followed by several more performances including one on a floating stage on the Vltava and others on a tour of Europe in 2022. 

A winner of third prize and the title of laureate at the Brno International Organ Competition in 2002, she is often invited to such leading music festivals as Beethovenfest Bonn, Prague Spring, Smetana’s Litomyšl, and Janáček May. She is a cofounder of the concert programme Music Between the Words, and she also devotes herself to composing. In 2010 she released a jazz album of her own music titled Meeting Point, and she has appeared at numerous jazz festivals.