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Pavel Bobek is one of the greats of Czech popular music, best known for his Czech versions of songs by American artists like Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan, and his long-time hero Johnny Cash. A trained architect, he started out in the Czechoslovak bigbít (rock’n’roll) scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s, singing with an early version of the band Olympic before becoming a member of the Semafor theatre, one of the country’s most vibrant cultural institutions in the Communist era.

Violin virtuoso and National Artist Josef Suk has been laid to rest in his family tomb in the Vyšehrad cemetery. The world-renowned musician died on July 7 at the age of 81 after a prolonged illness. Final respects were paid by the public in Prague’s Rudolfinum palace on Thursday. The burial was accompanied by Johan Sebastian Bach’s orchestral suite no 3. Among the speakers at the mass led by Cardinal Miroslav Vlk was President Václav Klaus, who noted that Josef Suk had brought world-wide fame not only to himself, but to his country. The great-grandson of Antonín Dvořák and grandson of composer Josef Suk is often credited with setting a standard for how Czech music is performed.

This week’s Sunday Music Show is devoted to a musician going by the name of Xindl X –a musician who combines rap, folk, hip hop, jazz and blues as the mood takes him; a musician whose lyrics are laced with irony and who says he writes protest songs which portray a world without God, morals or love -a world of scumbags of the generation X.

This edition of our Sunday Music Show, is devoted to the popular singer-songwriter Jaromír Nohavica. The prolific folk singer continues to be among the Czech Republic's most beloved musicians.

This edition of our Sunday Music show takes you through two decades of Čechomor, once known as the 'Czechomoravian Music Society', a band of former rockers who have breathed new life into traditional Czech music.

Hradišťan is one of the country’s most respected performers of folk music. The band started as a folk music ensemble in the south Moravian town of Uherské Hradiště – hence the name – in the 1950s but its rise to popularity and critical acclaim began when Jiří Pavlica became the band’s leader, or primáš, in the 1970s.

This edition of Radio Prague’s Sunday Music show is dedicated to one of the country’s great patriots – singer, composer and cabaret star Karel Hašler. Hašler’s love of his country is in his music and although he composed his songs more than a century ago they are still alive in people’s hearts and minds.

It’s a double-feature in the latest edition of the Sunday Music Show, featuring two of the most dynamic newer bands on the Czech music scene: Gipsy.cz and Toxique. Tune in for interviews and plenty of music.

Some of the best Czech films of the 1960s and 70s, such as Markéta Lazarová, Shop on Main Street, and The Cremator, have one thing in common, besides the country of origin: the author of the score, Zdeněk Liška. Only a few recordings of his music came out independently; most recently, the British label Finders Keepers published his soundtrack of The Little Mermaid. In this edition of Panorama, we look the life and work of this prolific composer, and one of the most versatile artists in the field.

In our Sunday Music Show this week, you’ll have a chance to sample some of the hits from the communist era. In those times, popular music was under a tight control of the authorities who made sure nothing ideologically subversive reached the audiences. At the same time, the cultural supervisors pushed authors to produce songs that would match the propagandistic needs of the regime, and the songs we’ll hear today are fine examples of just that.