Czech Music | All stories

It's a hundred years since the premiere of one of the great Czech operas, "Jenufa", by Leos Janacek. The centenary was marked in style last month with an international Janacek Festival in Brno, the capital of Moravia, the eastern part of the Czech Republic, where Janacek lived and worked nearly all his life, and where the opera was first performed in January 1904. "Jenufa" was the work that first drew serious attention to Janacek as a composer.

Welcome to Encore, our monthly look at the world of Czech classical music. Today we're going to be departing from the security of Dvorak or Smetana, and delving into the rich world of contemporary Czech experimental music. We'll be looking at the work of the Czech Republic's foremost experimental musical ensemble, the Agon Orchestra, which - aptly enough - is housed in one of Europe's most modern theatres, Prague's Divadlo Archa. The Agon Orchestra's director is Ivan Bierhanzl.

When Josephine Baker died in Paris in 1975, over twenty thousand people lined the city streets to watch her funeral procession. She is remembered as one of the great performers of all time, overcoming poverty and racial discrimination in the American south to become a legend in her lifetime. In the 1920s her shows in her adopted Paris combined song, dance and humour and took the city by storm, with an overt sensuality that for the time was almost revolutionary. During the Second World War she worked with the French Resistance, proving that her

After her 1998 solo concert in New York's Weill Recital Hall, the New York Times' critic described the young Czech harpist Katerina Englichova's playing as "feisty", with a "vigor and precision of touch", adding that for someone so slender she made "a surprisingly large sound on the harp." Indeed you shouldn't be deceived by appearances. With her long blond hair and slight frame Katerina may look the typical harpist, but, as we'll be hearing in this programme, her playing proves that the harp is an instrument of many different moods and not just

Prague's Jewish Museum recently released a CD that is nothing short of miraculous. At the height of the Nazi occupation of Prague during the Second World War, the Czech Jewish jazz musician, Fritz Weiss, made nearly thirty recordings with the Emil Ludvik Orchestra. Weiss was musical leader of the band and also made all the arrangements. Amazingly, he continued to work with the band even after he was sent to the Terezin ghetto. In Encore today, we'll be telling the story of these extraordinary swing recordings, made literally in the shadow of the