Hana Sapáková

Biography

“My job can fill me with all kinds of emotions, and every day makes me feel like I need to work towards improvement.”

Hana Sapáková comes from a musical family in Brno. Despite having grown up surrounded by music, she did not seek out the profession of a French horn player. At grammar school, she liked mathematics, and she devoted herself to singing and acting. As a child, however, she had already been captivated by the horn, when she heard a beautiful horn solo at a theatrical performance. “Later, when I was faced with the decision of what instrument to choose instead of the recorder, on which I had won a national competition, the choice was clear. My parents wanted to dissuade me from choosing the horn, so they took me to a horn recital, but the opposite happened—I fell in love with it”, she recalls.

She studied at the Brno Conservatoire under the guidance of Milan Mrazík and later at the Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität in Linz in the studio of Raimund Zell. She further developed her talent at masterclasses led by world-famous teachers; her own teachers have included André Cazalet, Johannes Hinterholzer, Přemysl Vojta, and Christian Lampert. During her studies, she played in the Orchestral Academy of the Czech Philharmonic and in the Prague Philharmonia, and she won a scholarship to the Academy of Chamber Music in Prague. She also took part in the Czech Philharmonic’s inaugural project of a joint orchestra with pupils at elementary schools of the arts.

She has many successes at competitions to her credit: a prize at the Leoš Janáček International Competition in Brno, the Pardubice Conservatoire Competition, the International Wind Instrument Competition in Brno, and the Pro Bohemia Ostrava International Competition. At the 2018 Prague Spring Competition, she was the most successful Czech participant on the French horn. She has made solo appearances with the Czech Philharmonic, the Brno Philharmonic, the Brno Youth Symphony, and the Helfert Chamber Music Society. With Ondřej Vrabec she recorded a concerto for two horns by František Václav Habermann and compositions by Peter Seabourne.

She became a member of the Czech Philharmonic in 2020. About her audition, she says: “I think it was a combination of the right timing and good preparations”. She loves the music of Late Romanticism, and especially the works of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. “What I enjoy most are the moments when I can lose myself in the huge sound of the orchestra and let myself be engulfed by emotions”, she adds.

She enjoys sports in her free time (skiing, swimming, football, squash) and likes to learn about psychology and self-development. She likes things that are orderly, systematic, and planned.