JINDRA BARTOVA

Research interests: 20th-century Czech music, history of music criticism.

Professor Jindra Bartova is Head of the Department of Music History and Management at the Janacek Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno. Author of two monographs on the 20th-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 professional periodicals and daily press.

MICHAEL BECKERMAN

Research interests: Czech and Eastern European music; nationalism; film music.

Professor Michael Beckerman is Chair of the Department of Music at the New York University. He is author of Dvorak and His World (Princeton University Press, 1993), Janacek as Theorist (Pendragon Press, 1994), and New Worlds of Dvorak (Norton, 2003). He writes regularly for the New York Times.

Professor Beckerman is a Laureate of the Czech Music Council and recipient of an Order for Merit from the Czech Parliament and the Janacek Medal from the Czech government for his research on Czech music. In 1989 he received the MLA Publication Award and in 2004 the ASCAP Deems-Taylor award for his new book, New Worlds of Dvorak.

DAVID BLOCH

Research interests: Music of Terezin, pre-war works of Ullmann, Haas, Krasa, Klein.

Author of numerous articles on Terezin composers, Professor 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. Since its inception in 1987, the project's aim has been to produce, in collaboration with Koch International, the Terezin Music Anthology Series that will document music composed in the Terezin concentration camp.

SYLVIE BODOROVA

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

Research interests: Czech vocal and chamber music.

Timothy Cheek, A.Mus.D., is Assistant Professor of Performing Arts, Vocal Arts and the Faculty Associate with CREES at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Cheek joined the faculty in 1994 following 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.

Dr. 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.

(Photo of T.Cheek by Lisa Kohler)

ERIK ENTWISTLE

Research interests: 19th- and 20th-century Czech music

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, and Slavic and East European 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.

JARMILA GABRIELOVA

Research interests: 19th-century music and music theatre, aesthetics of music, 19th- and 20th-century Czech composers, and Scandinavian music.

Professor Jarmila Gabrielova is Director of the Institute of Musicology at 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 is a member of various advisory committees and boards of institutions in the Czech Republic, including the Ministry of Culture, the Museum of Czech 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

Research interests: women composers, historical performance practice, history of opera.

Eugene Gates holds a B.A. in music (Acadia University), 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 research interests include women in music, historical performance practice, and history of opera. His doctoral dissertation was on nineteenth-century women composers. 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, and University of Toronto Quarterly.

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 www.antoninkubalek.com.

(Photo of A.Kubalek by Yanka and Yolanda Van der Kolk)

Specialization: Film and radio drama music

Prior to his immigrating to Canada from Czechoslovakia in 1968, Milan Kymlicka studied at the Prague Conservatory and the Prague Academy of Music and completed a ballet, piano and string quartets, a cello concerto, and some 20 film scores. By the early 1970s he was established as one of Canada's leading studio arrangers-conductors.

Milan Kymlicka has written scores for a number of feature films, TV series, and some forty CBC radio dramas. Besides his work for the entertainment industry Kymlicka continues writing chamber music. Among his more recent compositions are a Sonatina, Four Pieces, Four Valses, and Five Preludes for piano, Two Dances for clarinet and piano, Partissima for solo violin, and Cassation for two violins, viola, clarinet, and bassoon.

ODALINE DE LA MARTINEZ

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. She is also known as a broadcaster for BBC Radio and Television.

JAN SMACZNY

Research interests: Czech music (Dvorak, opera, 18th-20th centuries); music of the French Baroque

Dr. 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 (Prague, 1994), a study of the Czech Symphony (A Guide to the Symphony, Oxford, 1995), articles on the operas of Dvorak and Martinu (The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, London, 1992), a book on Dvorak's cello concerto (Cambridge, 1999) and a study of the life and works 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

Research interests: 20th-century music, music of the Renaissance and Baroque.

Dr. 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 also reconstructed Kapralova's Concertino, op. 21, for violin, clarinet and orchestra, which was published by Baerenreiter in 2003.

KERRY STRATTON

Special interest: Czech music

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. He has also recorded for the Hungaroton label, leading the Hungarian State Symphony Orchestra in the world premiere recording of Franz Liszt's De Profundis.