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The great Czech composer Antonín Dvořák lived in New York for three years in the 1890s, after being invited to teach at America’s national conservatory. Dvořák’s stay in the city made a tangible impact on his work, and it was there that he was to write the wonderful New World Symphony. Today his legacy in New York is kept alive by the Dvořák American Heritage Association.

The New York-based company Tamizdat brings music from central and eastern Europe to an American audience. They also act as an agency helping musicians get work visas to perform in the US, and handle the applications of virtually every Czech musician who plays in America. For that reason, Tamizdat owner Matthew Covey has an extensive knowledge of Czech artists and the US – which groups visit the States, where they play, and who they play to.

In this week's Arts, a look at the first new play by former Czech president Václav Havel in twenty years. "Leaving" - about a politician's painful adjustment to a new life after leaving politics - opened at Prague's Archa Theatre on May 22nd, marking a return to the stage for Mr Havel, a world-renowned playwright when he entered politics in 1989.

Anifest, a weeklong festival dedicated to animated film has fast become a firm fixture on the Czech cultural calendar since it was established seven years ago. This year’s event, which was held in the picturesque South Bohemian town of Třeboň, screened 320 films in various competitive categories as well as several animated works out of competition from all over the world.

Argippo, an opera by the famous Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, was last heard in the early 1730s. It disappeared just a couple of years after its premiere and was believed to have been lost forever. Until, that is, a determined Czech musician discovered the piece in a sheaf of anonymous scores in a collection in the Bavarian town of Regensburg. Last Saturday the lost Vivaldi opera was performed for the first time in over 270 years in the grand setting of the Spanish Hall at Prague Castle. The man who found it - conductor and harpsichordist Ondřej

Prague Kolektiv is a shop in New York which sells nothing but Czech furniture, lighting and decorative objects from the pre-war avant-garde and mid-century social realism periods. The store, located in the DUMBO district of Brooklyn, has been running for nearly three years and sells mostly original restored pieces (at prices that might startle your average Czech babička), as well as some replicas which it has made in the Czech Republic.

Some critics have already called it the most notable Czech film of the year – Petr Zelenka’s “The Karamazovs”. Inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel together with a famous long-running adaptation at Prague’s Dejvicke Theatre, the film opened in Prague on Thursday to wide anticipation. Layers within layers is one way of describing it as it focuses on actors performing the Karamazov story in a giant factory but it goes far beyond that, not only focusing on the actors on stage and off but also on one of the viewers. I sat down with the director a

Forty inhabitants of the village of Líšeň on the outskirts of Brno receive instructions before they get off the bus at the Berlin Wall to take part in the annual Biennial of Art. Near the wall are exact copies of fences they have in their backyards at home. In a while they’ll be climbing over to meet their neighbours. For many of them, it will be the first time they’ll shake hands or talk to each other. The person who brought them together is the Czech artist Kateřina Šedá. When we met in Prague, I ask her where she got this idea in the first

Coming up in this week’s Arts – a new opera that’s just premiered in Prague based on Communist Czechoslovakia's most notorious show trial. On June 27th, 1950 Milada Horáková - a democratic MP and campaigner for women's rights - was hanged on trumped-up charges of treason and espionage, despite appeals for clemency from world figures including Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein. This is the first attempt to bring one of the darkest periods of Czechoslovakia’s past to the stage.

Dudy is the Czech word for the bagpipes and Call of Dudy is the title of a documentary film focused on the Bohemian piping tradition. Featuring lots of great music and interesting interviews, it takes viewers to the instrument’s traditional strongholds in south and west Bohemia, and over the border into Bavaria.