Meet the elite jury of the 2025 Prague Spring Cello Competition
The chairman of the cello jury of the 2025 Prague Spring Competition, British cellist Raphael Wallfisch, became a legend already during his lifetime. Music has accompanied him since childhood: His father was the artistic partner of violinist Jascha Heifetz, with whom he held informal concerts at home. Raphael Wallfisch started his career at the age of twenty-four by winning the Gaspar Cassado International Competition in Florence. During his career he has performed at the BBC Proms, the Edinburgh Festival, the Berliner Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. He has played with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and many other great ensembles around the world. He has made countless recordings for Chandos, Naxos, EMI, Decca, Black Box, ASV, CPO and Nimbus. His discography also includes Bohuslav Martinů cello concertos with the Czech Philharmonic and Jiří Bělohlávek. He is a professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London and also at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London, where in addition to the cello he also engages in chamber music. During his career he has sat on many competition juries: Rostropovich Cello Competition in Paris, Alice and Eleonore Schoenfeld Competition in Harbin, China, and George Enescu International Competition in Bucharest.
Mstislav Rostropovich said of her she was the best cellist he had heard since Jacqueline du Pré: Maria Kliegel started her career with a series of victories in international competitions, including the Deutscher Musikrat competition in Bonn, the Aldo Parisot Cellofest Competition in Brazil and the Rostropovich Cello Competition in Paris. With more than one million albums sold, she is one of the best-selling cellists in history. She is the recipient of two Grammy Award nominations, an International Classical Music Award nomination and an OpusKlassik Award nomination. She has premiered works by Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina and Wilhelm Kaiser-Lindemann’s Hommage à Nelson Mandela. From 1986 to 2023 she gave masterclasses at the Cologne University of Music and Dance. In 2019 she became a member of the newly founded Institute of Musical Excellence in Wroclaw, Poland. She is also a professor of cello at the University of Music in Brescia and in 2021 she founded the international Cello-Forum La Cellissima in Essen, Germany, where she continues to successfully develop her teaching activities.
A protégé of Yehudi Menuhin and Mstislav Rostropovich, French cellist Marc Coppey entered the international music scene at the age of 18 by winning the prestigious Bach Competition in Leipzig. He has worked with conductors such as Alan Gilbert, Kirill Karabits, Emmanuel Krivine or Yan Pascal Tortelier. He regularly records for the international labels Decca, Harmonia Mundi, Accord/Universal and Naïve and his performances are part of the audio-visual archives of Arte.tv and Medici.tv. A sought-after chamber musician and acclaimed interpreter of contemporary music, he has premiered works by composers such as Elliott Carter, Annunzio Mantovani, Eric Tanguy and Erkki-Sven Tüür. From 1995 to 2000 he was a member of the Ysaÿe Quartet. He is a professor at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique in Paris and since 2020 he has been the artistic director of the Saline Royale Academy d’Arc-et-Senans. He regularly gives masterclasses in Europe, Asia, North and South America. In 2014, he was awarded the title Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture.
British cellist Natalie Clein is fully committed to her successful solo career. She regularly works with the Bournemouth Symphony, Philharmonia and Hallé Orchestras, Orchestre National de Lyon, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Orquesta Filarmónica de Buenos Aires. Her recordings on the prestigious Hyperion label have won numerous awards: the Diapason d’Or, Gramophone magazine’s “Album of the Month” and the Brit Award. This season she will be performing not only in the UK (Queen Elizabeth Hall and Wigmore Hall) but also in Denmark, Switzerland, Italy and Germany.
Michal Kaňka is one of the best Czech cellists in our modern history. Winner of the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow (1982) and winner of the Prague Spring Competition (1983) and the ARD Competition in Munich (1986), he has cooperated with orchestras in Japan, the USA, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Slovenia and, of course, the Czech Republic. He studied under Mirko Škampa, Viktor Moučka and Josef Chuchro, and for a short time under legendary cellists Paul Tortelier and André Navarra. In 1976 he founded the Martinů Quartet, in 1986-2022 he was a member of the Pražák Quartet, since April 2017 he has been a member of the Wihan Quartet and since 2019 of the Talich Quartet. He is a professor at HAMU (the Prague Academy of Performing Arts) and the Prague Conservatory, chairman of the permanent committee of the Prague Spring International Music Competition, member of the Board of Directors of the Bohuslav Martinů Foundation and, since 2018, member of the Artistic Board of the Prague Spring Festival.
Winner of the 2006 Prague Spring Competition and finalist of the 2011 Pierre Fournier Award in London, Tomáš Jamník has made his debuts at the Wigmore Hall, Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Mozarteum in Salzburg and Japan’s Kitara Hall and Tokyo Metropolitan Hall. He studied cello at the HAMU in Prague under Mirko Škampa, Martin Škampa and Josef Chuchro, and continued his studies in Leipzig under Peter Bruns and at the Universität der Künste in Berlin under Jens Peter Maintz. He completed his studies as a scholarship holder at the renowned Karajan Akademie of the Berliner Philharmoniker. In addition, he has completed masterclasses with Heinrich Schiff, Gustav Rivinius, Truls Mørk, Pieter Wispelwey and Steven Isserlis. Tomáš Jamník also devotes himself to contemporary music: he has premiered works by Czech composers Miroslav Srnka, Michal Nejtek, Slavomír Hořínka, Marko Ivanović, Tomáš ‘Floex’ Dvořák and Ondřej Kukal. In 2018, he became the artistic director of the Ševčík Academy and is the author of the Vážný zájem (Serious Interest) initiative, which promotes the idea of house concerts.
Bratislava-born Ľudovít Kanta has been concertmaster of the Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa in Nagoya, Japan, since 1990. He graduated from HAMU in Prague in the class of Alexandr Večtomov. In 1980 he was a laureate of the Prague Spring Competition and before moving to Japan he worked in the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra from 1982 to 1990. His solo career took him to many places in Europe, the USA and Asia. He has worked with conductors such as Zdeněk Košler, Valery Gergiev and Hiroyuki Iwaki.