Those interested in active participation can apply by sending a CV (max. 900 characters) to the email address stehlikova@dvorakovapraha.cz by 31 July 2023. The age limit for participants is 25.

Public masterclasses are yet another way that the Academy of Classical Music at the Dvořák Prague Festival is working to promote the education of musicians. As an auxiliary programme in the series For the Future, it gives young musicians the chance to play before exceptional artists and to consult on their views on the interpretation of a work with performers who have invaluable experience on the world’s great stages. A masterclass is a unique opportunity for the public to witness the final phase of preparing an interpretation. Rather than a usual lesson, it is an exchange of artistic opinions. It gives an exciting insight into the final phase of a young artist’s preparation before the moment when her or she appears in the concert arena with a finished interpretive conception in order to share an artistic opinion with the public.

The phenomenal violinist Gil Shaham will be guiding young violinists through the world of selected music works on 8 Sept. 2023 at 15 p.m. at the Small Piano Recital Hall.

You can buy tickets to a masterclass here for CZK 200. Ticket prices are reduced by 50% for students at elementary schools of the arts, conservatoires, the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, and students at other schools of the arts. To get the discount code, please contact us at vstupenky@dvorakovapraha.cz

It is one of the most exciting experiences to witness what it means to make music at the very highest level. The great violinist Gil Shaham is one of the few whose spontaneity, musical wit and ability to analyse soon turn every performance into an event.

Gil Shaham is a soloist with many of the great orchestras and conductors of our time. He has performed in Berlin and Munich, in Brussels, Amsterdam and Vienna, in New York, Tokyo, London, Chicago, Hamburg, Zurich, Paris, Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco. His CD recordings have received the highest honours, including the Grammy, the Grand Prix du Disque, the Diapason d’Or and Gramophone Editor’s Choice. In 1990 and 2008 he was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize, and in 2012 he was honoured by Musical America as “Instrumentalist of the Year”.

Gil Shaham studied with Dorothy DeLay and Hyo Kang at the Juilliard School in New York. He made his debut with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra at the age of ten and played with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under Zubin Mehta for the first time at the age of fourteen.

Gil Shaham has recorded the great violin repertoire for the record label Canary Classics, which he founded in 2004. The violin concertos of the 1930s are particularly close to his heart. Following the release of the first album with five violin concertos from these years, Canary Classics released the second album with the second violin concertos by Bartók and Prokofiev.

Gil Shaham plays the 1699 Stradivarius Countess Polignac and lives in New York with his wife, violinist Adele Anthony, and their three children.

source: Concerto Winderstein

photo © Chris Lee

The masterclass will be held in the Small Piano Hall (room No. 1034), situated at the Music and Dance Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in the late Baroque Lichtenstein Palace in Prague's Lesser Town. The building also includes the Bohuslav Martinů Hall with a capacity of 200 people and the Gallery Concert Hall for 130 people. Both halls are mainly used for graduation concerts and more intimate events. The palace is protected as a cultural monument of the Czech Republic.