Jiří Bělohlávek

No conductor in modern times did more to extend and enrich appreciation of Czech orchestral music than Jiří Bělohlávek. Born in Prague in 1946, he grew up under a Communist regime that stressed national identity in music, and his youthful lessons with the outstanding Czech cellist Miloš Sádlo were also formative in this respect. After studying at the Prague Conservatory, he went on to conduct the Czech Philharmonic and then the Prague Symphony Orchestra, where he remained chief conductor until the Velvet Revolution in 1989. After a brief spell as chief conductor of the Prague Philharmonic, Bělohlávek left to form his own, privately funded orchestra, the Prague Philharmonia. He later became chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, where he had the honour of being the first non-anglophone conductor to direct the internationally broadcast Last Night of the Proms in 2007. Bělohlávek’s conducting style remained dignified and untheatrical, but the inner warmth and authority of his performances and recordings of fellow Czechs Dvořák, Janáček, and Martinů made a strong impression. He died in Prague in 2017, a month after his final concert appearance, conducting, appropriately, Dvořák’s profoundly elegiac Requiem (1890).