Dvořák & Brahms – musical meeting

Soloist of the National Theatre in Prague, mezzo-soprano Veronika Hajnová made her debut at the State Opera Prague in 2004 as Amneris in Verdi’s Aida and in the historic building of the National Theatre in 2006 as Ježibaba in Dvořák’s Rusalka.

She graduated from the Conservatory and the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. Her repertoire includes, among others. Her repertoire includes the title roles of Bizet’s Carmen, Charlotte (Massenet: Werther), Delilah (Saint-Saëns: Samson and Delilah), Verdi’s Azucena (Il Trovatore) and Amneris (Aida), Venus (Wagner: Tannhäuser), Herodias (Strauss: Salome), Dvořák’s Ježibaba (Rusalka) and Káča (The Devil and Kate), Kostelnička (Janáček: Jenůfa), Dorabella (Mozart: Così fan tutte), Suzuki (Puccini: Madama Butterfly), Olga (Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin) and Dido (Purcell: Dido and Aeneas). In addition to opera, her repertoire also includes oratorio and song works. Among them are the mezzo-soprano part in Verdi’s Requiem, which she performed at the Opera Municipale in Marseille, Mahler’s Songs of the Dead Children, which she performed at the Festival of Forbidden Music in Terezín in 2013, and the part of Zefka from Janáček’s The Notebook of the Disappeared, which she performed at the Opera Bastille in Paris in 2007 and at the International Music Festival in Milan in 2008.

In 2002 she was a semi-finalist in the Belvedere International Singing Competition in Vienna, where she won the CNIPAL prize. She has twice been shortlisted for the Thalia Prize – in 2003 for the role of Dalila in Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila and in 2010 for Joan in Tchaikovsky’s The Maid of Orleans.

He studied at the Janáček Conservatory in Ostrava with Prof. Monika Tugendliebová and at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague with Prof. Ivan Klánský. He honed his performance skills with master classes with Lazar Berman, Garrick Ohlsson, Christian Zacharias and Paul Badura-Skoda. Winning the 1998 Prague Spring Festival and the Young Concert Artists competition in New York in 1999 opened the way to the world’s concert halls and international festivals – Carnegie Hall, the Great Hall of the Berlin Philharmonic, Wigmore Hall, Tonhalle Zürich, Gewandhaus in Leipzig, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, De Doelen in Rotterdam, Finlandia Hall in Helsinki, Auditorio in Barcelona, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, Kennedy Center in Washington, etc.
Under the baton of conductors (Pinchas Zukerman, Marin Alsop, Yakov Kreizberg, Ingo Metzmacher, Serge Baudo, Ken-Ichiro Kobayashi, Libor Pešek, Jakub Hrůša, Tomáš Netopil) he performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, New York Chamber Philharmonic, DSO Berlin, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Stuttgarter Philharmoniker, Rotterdam Symphony Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic, Singapore Philharmonic. He regularly collaborates with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and the Prague Symphony Orchestra.
Apart from his concert activities and chamber music, Martin Kasík is devoted to the education of the young generation at HAMU in Prague and at the Prague Conservatory. He is the artistic director of the International Chopin Festival in Mariánské Lázně. His recordings for Arco Diva and Supraphon have won top awards in Gramophone, Repertoire and Harmonie magazines.