David Vaughan

When Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings launched the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in February 1916, they set into motion a process that was to cause a revolution in European art…

Today we bring you no less than two father-and-daughter musical teams, with music by Czech composers Jan Novak, Lubos Sluka and Jaroslav Ridky, as well as an excellent…

If anybody can be described as a born poet, then Tera Fabianova must be a strong candidate. Although she left school at just eleven, she was fluent in four languages, and…

Today we devote the whole of Encore to one disk. It is entitled 'Czech String Quartet Discoveries' and was issued privately by the celebrated Stamic Quartet - making it…

There is nothing unusual about politicians writing books. Sometimes they outline a political vision, or they might be a gesture to posterity in the hope of putting a…

On 17th March, Radek Hanykovics would have celebrated his 38th birthday. Radek had known for some time that his lung cancer was untreatable, but his death on 30th January…

In this edition of Encore - with a strong Moravian flavour - we discuss an impressive first recording by the young Pavel Haas String Quartet, and we also look at a…

The Czech premiere of Tom Stoppard's recent play Rock 'N' Roll was one of the big literary and social events of the year, attended not just by the playwright himself, but…

Karel Janovicky has had a distinguished career as a composer, pianist, writer and broadcaster, and at 77 is still full of energy. When I interviewed him in his study in…

You wouldn't usually associate music with mysterious arts of the alchemist, but in Prague, at the beginning of the 17th century, just about anything was possible. In…