Mozart felt that the people of Prague appreciated his music more than anyone else, and many of the most influential and highly-regarded composers of his era were Bohemians. This dynamic programme is framed by two vibrantly dramatic G minor symphonies, and it also features three arias and a startlingly visceral scene from Benda’s melodrama Medea. Programme... Read more »

The screening of a new documentary film combining never-before-seen archive footage with the memories of fighter pilot Frantisek Fajtl and gunner Filip Jansky, both serving in the RAF during the war. Taken from their published work Fajtl’s and Jansky‘s precise observations and poignant reflections are voiced by two actors retelling their experiences from escaping their... Read more »

The English College Foundation is planning a sponsored walk to raise funds for scholarships for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, to enable them to study in the International Baccalaureate years at the English College in Prague. In the past such scholarships have funded talented students from the Roma community or who were raised in children’s homes.... Read more »

Session I: From Normalization to Loss of Norms: Václav Havel and the Forms of Democratic Backsliding The decades following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 were dubbed the period of ‘Normalization’: a chilling term intended to designate a return to the efficient social controls that had been the norm across the Soviet Bloc prior... Read more »

Session III: The Spectre of Dissent Still Haunts Europe In his essay The Power of the Powerless, Havel famously asked: What role does dissent play in society? What are its hopes? Can dissidents actually change anything? Though focusing on the power and the powerless in communist Europe in the 1970s, Havel's distinction between the forces of... Read more »

To celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Emmy Destinn Foundation. Featuring  young artists, the winners of the biennial competition The Emmy Destinn Young Singers Awards performing arias by Janáček, Dvořák, Smetana, Mozart and Puccini. Caroline Taylor                          soprano               ... Read more »

Jana Varga is a Slovak-born singer songwriter now based in London, having trained and worked musically in France, the United States and elsewhere. Her well crafted songs are at home in the broad Americana genre but their roots run much deeper. Jana’s natural musicianship is founded in her classical music training, and further influenced by... Read more »

The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra performs ‘Vltava’ from Smetana’s Má Vlast – an evocative orchestral picture of the river that flows through Prague, filled with ebbing and flowing woodwind and strings.  Dvořák was staying at his summer resort when he wrote his Eighth Symphony, and you can hear the bird song and thunderstorms of a summer’s day in Bohemia in the... Read more »

Karel Šejnoha (Zdeněk Svěrák’s alter ego), a well-known, aging writer, faces a writer‘s block. He has a head full of unfinished stories whose fictional characters start to appear in real life lobbying for their stories to be finally completed. Each and every one of them demands something. The photographer Matěj wants the beautiful but unapproachable... Read more »

Voted the Best Czech Film 2021 by the critics, this black comedy thriller fuelled by vodka, cigarettes, and cowardice hilariously investigates Czech-Soviet relations. After a premiere, the theatre group is celebrating in a bar when an uninvited guest crashes the party. A drunken Russian officer has come to sell a can of petrol, but soon... Read more »