JINDRA BARTOVA
Janacek Academy of Performing Arts, Brno, Czech Republic.
Research interests: 20th-century Czech music, history of music criticism.

Professor Jindra Bartova chairs the Department of Music History at the Janacek Academy of Performing Arts in Brno. Author of two monographs on twentieth-century Czech composers Jan Kapr and Miloslav Istvan, Professor Bartova has also published a series of articles on contemporary Czech composers and on the history and general problems of music criticism, in Czech musicological journals Hudebni veda, Hudebni rozhledy, and Opus musicum. In addition, she has authored numerous entries in the Dictionary of Contemporary Czech Composers and in Komponisten der Gegenwart. She regularly writes music reviews for both the professional periodicals and the daily press. In 2007, Prof. Bartova was instrumental to the success of the world premiere of Kapralova's symphonic ballad-cantata Ilena, op. 15, a project of the Janacek Academy she coordinated. The initiative was encouraged and assisted by the Society.

Michael Beckerman is professor of music and chair of the Music Department at New York University. He has written several books on Czech topics, including, Dvorak and His World (Princeton University Press, 1993), Janacek as Theorist (Pendragon Press, 1994), New Worlds of Dvorak (Norton, 2003), Janacek and His World (Princeton, 2003) and Martinu’s Mysterious Accident (Pendragon, 2007). He is at present working on a book and documentary about Gideon Klein. He writes frequently for the New York Times and has appeared numerous times on Live from Lincoln Center. A recipient of the Janacek Medal from the Czech Ministry of Culture, he is a laureate of the Czech Music Council. He has also received the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award several times for his work on Dvorak. He is also Director of Research for the OREL Foundation, an organization devoted to twentieth-century composers whose music was banned during the years of Nazi oppression in Europe: nineteen men and one woman - Vitezslava Kapralova.

Author of numerous articles on Terezin composers, David Bloch has served as an advisor to a number of important documentaries, including BBC Television's The Music of Terezin and the Swedish Television documentary on Ullmann - Goethe and Ghetto. He has edited Hans Krasa's Three Songs for Tempo/Bote & Bock and Viktor Ullmann's Hebrew and Yiddish solo and choral arrangements for Schott Musik International in Mainz. Professor Bloch is Producer and Artistic Director of the Terezin Music Memorial Project. The project's aim is to produce the Terezin Music Anthology Series that will document music composed in the Terezin concentration camp.

Sylvie Bodorova studied composition at the Janacek Academy of Music in Brno and at the Academy of Music in Prague. She continued her studies with Professor Franco Donatoni at the Academia Chigiana, and from 1987 she regularly attended Professor Ton de Leuw's composition courses in Amsterdam. Sylvie Bodorova taught at the Janacek Academy in Brno, and during 1994-96, she was a composer-in-residence at the CCM Cincinnati, Ohio. Since early 1980s her works have been performed world-wide, including the Antarctic. She is winner of several music competitions and recipient of numerous commissions, the latest from the Warwick Festival for her Terezin Ghetto Requiem. She is a member of the Czech composer collective Quattro.

Timothy Cheek joined the faculty of the Michigan School of Music in 1994, following his studies at Oberlin, the University of Texas at Austin, and Michigan. He served opera internships at the Teatro Comunale in Florence, Italy, and at the National Theatre in Prague. His performances as a collaborative pianist have taken him to twelve countries, and have been heard on world-wide broadcasts, PBS, and Austrian television. Highlights of his work include engagements at the Ravinia Festival's Steans Institute, the Santa Fe Opera, the International Institute for Chamber Music in Munich, the Mozart Opera Studies Institute in Austria, the Israel Vocal Arts Institute in Tel Aviv, and recitals in Hong Kong and at the American Academy in Rome. Timothy Cheek has held several grants, including an Olivetti Foundation Grant to perform in Italy, a Fulbright award, and an IREX grant to conduct research in the Czech Republic which led to his book Singing in Czech: A Guide to Czech Lyric Diction and Vocal Repertoire, published by Scarecrow Press in 2001. Dr. Cheek is an ardent promoter of Kapralova's music. In 2003, he was instrumental in the release of Kapralova's art songs by Supraphon, and in 2005 he edited a complete, critical edition of the songs for Amos Editio.

Erik Entwistle holds a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is on the faculty of the Longy School of Music and also taught for six years at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA. His writings have been featured in the New York Times, Opera Quarterly, Slavic and East European Journal, and the Kapralova Society Journal. As musicologist, Dr. Entwistle has devoted much of his scholarly efforts to the music of Czech composers. He is particularly interested in Bohuslav Martinu who was the subject of his doctoral dissertation. Since 1993, he has been also actively promoting the music of Vitezslava Kapralova in lecture-recitals. As pianist, Dr. Entwistle has presented concerts and lecture-recitals of Czech music in Boston, New York City, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, as well as in Prague and in Martinu's birthplace of Policka. He has recently recorded a new CD of Martinu's piano works, featuring ten world premieres, for Summit Records.

Professor Jarmila Gabrielova is Director of the Institute of Musicology at the Charles University in Prague and Head of the Department of Music History at the Institute of Ethnology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. Past President of the Czech Musicological Society, Professor Gabrielova has served on a number of advisory committees and boards of institutions in the Czech Republic, including the Ministry of Culture, Czech Museum of Music, the International Musicological Colloquium Brno, and the Antonin Dvorak Society (Prague). Her articles on a wide range of musical subjects have appeared in Musicologia olomucensia, Miscellanea musicologica, Opus musicum, Hudebni veda, Hudebni rozhledy, and other music journals.

Eugene Gates holds an M.A. in music criticism (McMaster University), and an Ed.D. in aesthetics of music (University of Toronto). He teaches piano, organ, music history and music appreciation at the Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto. He is also organist and choirmaster of St. Barnabas Anglican Church, Toronto, and is active as an accompanist, adjudicator, examiner, and clinician. His doctoral dissertation was on nineteenth-century women composers, and his articles on women composers and other musical subjects have appeared in the Journal of Aesthetic Education, Canadian Music Educator, Journal of the American Liszt Society, Music Educators Journal, Tempo, VivaVoce, Czech Music, University of Toronto Quarterly, and the Kapralova Society Journal, which he co-edits with Karla Hartl.

Antonin Kubalek has been one of the finest pianists of his generation. He studied under Frantisek Maxian at the Prague Academy of Music, won several prestigious awards in Eastern Europe and an Honors Diploma from the Enesco International Music Festival in Bucharest. In the 1950s and '60s Antonin Kubalek was a professor at the Prague Conservatory and recorded extensively for Supraphon. In 1968, Antonin Kubalek left Czechoslovakia and immigrated to Canada where he re-established his career, performing frequently with the Toronto Symphony and other orchestras. In addition to his concert activities, he has made numerous recordings for Dorian Recordings and has been featured by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in many concert broadcasts. He has the distinction of being the only artist to have made a recording on which the late Glenn Gould served as producer (the 2nd Piano sonata by Korngold). Antonin Kubalek is President of the Fred Gaviller Memorial Fund, a charity sponsoring debut recitals of Canadian musicians, and chairman of the Kapralova Society Advisory Committee. For more information on Antonin Kubalek visit his website at antoninkubalek.com.

Cuban-born, American-raised Odaline de la Martinez pursues a busy international career performing a great variety of repertoire ranging from Mozart symphonies to the latest of contemporary music. Brought up and educated in the USA, she settled in London and studied at the Royal Academy of Music. Later she became founder and music director of the contemporary ensemble Lontano, of the London Chamber Symphony and, in 1990, the European Women's Orchestra. In 1992 she founded her own record label, LORELT, which concentrates on areas neglected by many recording companies, including women's music. Her 1994 performance of Ethel Smyth's opera The Wreckers, recorded for Conifer Classics, has been unsurpassed. She is also known as a broadcaster for BBC Radio and Television.

Jan Smaczny has written a large range of articles on many aspects of Czech music. Among his publications is a catalogue of repertoire for the Prague Provisional Theatre (1994), a guide to the Czech Symphony (Oxford Press, 1995), articles on the operas of Dvorak and Martinu (for the New Grove Dictionary of Opera), a book on Dvorak's cello concerto (Cambridge Press, 1999) and a study of the life and music of Dvorak (Oxford, 2000). Professor Smaczny was educated at the University of Oxford and the Charles University, Prague. Since 1996 he has been the Hamilton Harty Professor of Music at Queen's University, Belfast. A frequent broadcaster on BBC Radios 3 and 4, he regularly writes reviews for The BBC Music Magazine, the Opera Magazine and The Independent.

Milos Stedron is Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the Masaryk University in Brno. He is one of the best known composers of stage and film music in the Czech Republic and author of a series of monographs, including one on Janacek. Dr. Stedron has been involved in the critical edition of the complete works of Janacek and his name is also closely associated with the performance of some of Janacek's incomplete compositions (The Danube Symphony, the Pilgrimage of the Soul Violin Concerto and others) which he has finished and prepared for performance with Leos Faltus. In 2000, he and Dr. Faltus reconstructed Kapralova's Concertino for Violin, Clarinet and Orchestra, op. 21, which was published by Baerenreiter in 2003.

Kerry Stratton has a degree in conducting from McGill University in Montreal. His graduate studies were completed at the Vienna Conservatory under Sir Charles Mackerras, Academia Chigiana in Siena, Italy, and L’Ecole Pierre Monteux with Charles Bruck. In the course of his international career, Kerry Stratton has conducted orchestras in Europe, North America and Asia. He is Conductor and Music Director of the Toronto Philharmonia, the orchestra-in-residence at the Toronto Centre for the Arts, a post he has held since 1988. Since 1992, he has also been Music Director for the Huntsville Festival of the Arts, Ontario. A long-time devotee of Czech music, Kerry Stratton's Dorian recording of works by Slavic composers with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra has earned him high praise in record reviews. In June 2007, the Czech Republic honoured Maestro Stratton in Prague with its prestigious Gratias Agit Award. The prize is given to exceptional persons who have made a significant contribution to promoting Czech culture.