Jan Kučera is a conductor, composer and pianist, and one of the most versatile contemporary Czech artists. Since the 2015/2016 season Kučera has been the chief conductor of the Karlovy Vary Symphony Orchestra. He studied composition and conducting at the Prague Conservatory and later expanded his studies at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.
Kučera has composed symphonic and chamber pieces, cantatas and songs, as well as incidental music for more than 30 productions for theatres in Prague and elsewhere in the Czech Republic. He has also created musical arrangements, including symphonic adaptations of music from Czech films.
As a conductor Kučera has regularly collaborated with leading Czech orchestras, with which he has performed or recorded a classical repertoire, as well as more than 100 symphonic pieces by contemporary composers. Between 2002 and 2010, he mainly worked with the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Kučera has prepared and conducted as well several opera productions at the National Theatre in Prague – Rossini’s La Cenerentola, Shostakovich’s Orango and Anti-Formalist Rayok, or his own comic opera Red Mary.
In 2016, he wrote his first ballet, The Three Musketeers, by commission for the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre. Kučera’s latest accomplishment has been to write and conduct the music for the ballet The Taming of the Shrew which will premiere in November this year in Pilsen in the Czech Republic.