Czech Philharmonic • Open Air Concert

The young Czech pianist Marek Kozák has been lauded for his impeccable technique, sense of proportion and gradation, plethora of registers, immense musicality and profound respect for the score. A highly cultivated performer, he enchants listeners with his ability to “convey with humility and without ostentatious gesture that which the composer aimed to express” (M. Bátor, Czech Radio, Vltava).

A graduate of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where he studied under Ivan Klánský, he has received many international awards. In June 2021, he became a laureate of the prestigious Concours Géza Anda in Zürich. Moreover, he advanced to the final of the Ferruccio Busoni Competition in Bolzano and the semi-final of the Fryderyk Chopin Competition in Warsaw, and won the European Piano Competition in Bremen, where he also earned the audience prize. He received second prize at the 2016 Prague Spring Competition for his performance of Adam Skoumal’s The Juggler. 
A pianist enjoying international renown, Marek Kozák has been invited to give recitals in Switzerland, Germany, Spain and other countries. Yet he has most frequently performed in the Czech Republic, appearing at such major events as the Leoš Janáček International Music Festival in Ostrava, Smetana’s Litomyšl, Dvořák Prague, Saint Wenceslas Music Festival and the Rudolf Firkušný International Piano Festival. He has performed with leading Czech orchestras as a soloist and within their recital cycles (in February 2023, he debuted as a guest of the Prague Symphony Orchestra at the Rudolfinum). 

Besides the piano repertoire staples, primarily Fryderyk Chopin and J. S. Bach works (he performed both sets of The Well-Tempered Clavier at two successive editions of Smetana’s Litomyšl, for instance), he has also undertaken little-known piano concertos by Karel Kovařovic, Vítězslava Kaprálová and Pavel Bořkovec, which he has recorded with the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Robert Jindra. His most recent album, Zapomenuté klavírní koncerty (Forgotten Piano Concertos), released in March 2024, has extended his discography, following his profile CD featuring pieces by Joseph Haydn, Fryderyk Chopin, César Franck, Sergei Rachmaninov and Adam Skoumal.

In addition to appearing as a soloist, Marek Kozák performs chamber music, most often along with the soprano Simona Šaturová and – as today – the cellist Václav Petr. Within the current Year of Czech Music, he and the German tenor Thoma Jaron-Wutz have prepared a recital focusing on Bedřich Smetana’s life. Mark Kozák also works as an educator, teaching at the City of Prague Music School. 

Marek Eben is perhaps best known as a television presenter. He serves as the host of the popular StarDance competition and has been one of the key figures of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival since 1996. A graduate of the Music and Drama Department at the Prague Conservatoire, Eben is also an accomplished musician.
The son of the late organist and composer Petr Eben, he continues his father’s artistic legacy in his own distinctive way as the sole songwriter for The Eben Brothers, a band that released its sixth album, Co my víme, at the start of the 2023/2024 academic year.
Eben’s work as a composer extends beyond his own ensemble. He has written music for the films Bizon and Hele on letí, as well as for the television series Poste restante. He has also composed music and lyrics for around twenty stage productions, including Othello at Studio Ypsilon and A Winter’s Tale at the National Theatre.
On Czech Television, in addition to StarDance, Eben has appeared in the quiz show The Treasure of Agnes of Bohemia, and his long-running talk show Na plovárně has become a beloved classic. He has twice been the overall winner of the TýTý Award, formerly presented to the most popular television personalities.

Although the professional life of Alain Altinoglu today is not very different from that of his famed conducting colleagues, he took a truly unique path to the most prestigious concert halls and famed opera houses. He grew up in a poor suburb of Paris in a family with Armenian roots; his father was a professor of mathematics, and his mother was a pianist. He is said to have learned to read music before he knew the alphabet. He began playing the violin at age five, but he soon switched to piano, which he eventually studied, graduating from the Paris Conservatoire. However, it was the orchestral sound that the piano lacked that stayed with him: he listened to recordings of orchestral compositions and he gobbled up scores that had been collected by his grandfather. At age 20, he even had fun transcribing them for piano. This went hand-in-hand with his fascination with conducting: he enjoyed watching conductors and having discussions with them. He taught himself on his path to a conducting career, but he needed the opportunity to show what he could do.

That opportunity came by chance when at age 18 he was working as a repetiteur at Paris’s Opéra Bastille. At one of the rehearsals, it was necessary for him to stand in for the conductor Denis Russell Davies. The rehearsal went wonderfully, and the young repetiteur received great encouragement from the orchestra to pursue a conducting career. He still had a long way to go to join world’s elite conductors, and that is a part of his conducting philosophy: “To achieve the best result, you need maturity, and you need lots of time in your life. You have to be able to read between the lines. You are never finished; you have to work every day and try to understand why something did not go the way you wanted.” He sees the conductor as an intermediary between the orchestra and the listener, and he tries to convey the composer’s intentions to listeners while also presenting his own opinion.

At present he is employed as chief conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra and makes many guest appearances with orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Cleveland Orchestra. He shows his enthusiasm for opera as music director of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, where his current projects include the entire Ring des Nibelungen. He is often seen at other opera houses from New York’s Metropolitan Opera to London’s Covent Garden. He teaches conducting at the Paris Conservatoire, and since July 2023 he has also been the artistic director of the International Festival in Colmar. He appears with his wife, mezzo-soprano Nora Gubitch, as a pianist in recitals, and they have made many recordings of the art song repertoire in which the husband-and-wife duo specialises.

His first live performance with the Czech Philharmonic came in 2022. At the rehearsals for a programme of music by Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Camille Saint-Saëns, he focused mainly on creating the authentic orchestral sound for the repertoire. As he put it: “I wanted to teach the orchestra to speak French.”