Czech Chamber Music Society • Dagmar Šašková

Mezzo-soprano Dagmar Šašková’s main focus is Baroque music, in which she has specialised for twenty years. She has been living in Paris for many years but returns regularly to the Czech Republic – in the spring of 2025, for example, she performed at the Easter Festival of Sacred Music in Brno, whilst a year earlier she appeared at the Znojmo Music Festival in the title role of Vivaldi’s oratorio Juditha Triumphans. As a soloist, she collaborates with a wide range of ensembles, including Musica Florea, Collegium 1704, the Czech Ensemble Baroque, Le Poème Harmonique, Vedado Consort, Les Traversées baroques and others. On French stages, she has performed roles in operas and oratorios by Monteverdi, Handel, Galuppi, Lully, Campra and Purcell. She has also recorded more than 20 CDs of Italian, French, Spanish and German Baroque music. She is also active as a teacher; she has taught Baroque singing in India, Chile, South Korea, Poland and a number of French cities, and in the Czech Republic she teaches, for example, at the Summer School of Baroque Music Holešov and the International Summer School of Early Music Valtice.

Monika Knoblochová specialises in playing both historical and modern keyboard instruments; she focuses on historically informed performance of Baroque music as well as contemporary music. She studied harpsichord in Dresden, Cologne, Munich and at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where she currently also teaches. She has taken part in numerous competitions and won a wide range of awards (laureate of the Prague Spring Competition, the Bohuslav Martinů Foundation and Society Prize, the Prix Davidoff Czech Republic, and the Czech Dance Platform). She performs regularly as a soloist and chamber musician both at home and abroad, and also collaborates with numerous soloists and ensembles. She has also recorded many CDs and programmes for Czech Radio. Since 2008, she has been organising her own concert series, the Café crème Music Salon, which combines early and modern music, spoken word, dance and theatre in inventive programmes; in 2026, the individual themed evenings are dedicated to European traditions, with programmes inspired by France, Germany, Spain and Austria.