First round jury

The clarinettist Karel Dohnal is a laureate from a number of international competitions, has recorded several CDs with both solo and chamber repertoires and is a member of the PhilHarmonia Octet, the Amadeus Trio and the orchestra of the State Opera in Prague. He works as a teacher at the Faculty of the Arts at Ostrava University and regularly leads courses both here and abroad. He is a very well regarded and popular performer of modern music and has premiered and initiated the creation of a number of solo and chamber works by contemporary composers. He has recently performed as a solo artist with Bamberg Symphony and the Essen Philharmonic, amongst others.

The renowned Lithuanian pianist Justas Dvarionas graduated from the Moscow Conservatory as a student of Mikhail Pletnev, amongst others. He is a laureate of many prestigious competitions in the former Czechoslovakia, Italy, Portugal and Lithuania. He has performed in a number of European countries, the United States, Japan and Australia as both a solo and a chamber ensemble performer. He is also involved in teaching activities at music schools in Great Britain and Lithuania and he often leads master classes. He has held the post of the Vice President of the European Union of Music Competitions for Youth since 2008 and he is an active member of a lot of international juries for music competitions in Europe, Asia and North America.

The Japanese violinist, Shizuka Ishikawa, received the first prize in the Concertino Praga international competition in 1969, whereupon she moved to Prague and studied as a Czechoslovak Radio scholarship holder from 1970. She later received laureate titles in the international Henryk Wieniawski Competition in Poznan, the Queen Elizabeth Competition in Brussels and the Fritz Kreisler Competition in Vienna. She performed her first solo concert with the Czech Philharmonic at the age of nineteen and two years later she played at the Prague Spring festival for the first time. Her repertoire includes a lot of Czech music and she has performed with the Czech Philharmonic, the Brno Philharmonic and the Dvořák Chamber Orchestra amongst others. She has been a member of the Kubelík Trio since 1997, with which she regularly performs on world stages.

The pianist and musical director Markéta Tomková Janáčková graduated from the Conservatory in Teplice and the Academy of the Performing Arts in Prague AMU. She has performed as a soloist and a chamber player on concert stages both at home and abroad and she has cooperated with the Prague Chamber Orchestra, the Moravian Philharmonic Olomouc and the Bohuslav Martinů Philharmonic Zlín. She has devoted herself to the theme of Jewish authors from Terezín since 1999. She is the founder and a member of the Janáček Trio. Since 2009, she has worked as a music director at Czech Radio. She has also cooperated with Czech Television and the Czech Philharmonic in the same role during the recording of educational concerts.

The pianist Karel Košárek is a winner of the Smetana Piano Competition and the Corpus Christi Piano Competition and a laureate of the Walter Naumburg Competition in New York. He has worked with a number of significant conductors, including Jiří Bělohlávek, Christopher Hogwood, Jakub Hrůša and Tomáš Netopil, and with leading orchestras, including the Czech Philharmonic. He has released a number of recordings with Supraphon, Naxos, Hyperion and others. He has accompanied Magdalena Kožená, Soňa Červená, Radek Baborák and Jiří Bárta at many chamber concerts. In the last seasons, he performed solo recitals in New York, Dallas, Palm Beach, Calgary, Tel Aviv, Saint Petersburg and Bangkok, amongst other venues.