František Preisler

Guest of Prague State Opera

František Preisler studied organ at the Brno Conservatory, and subsequently pursued his education by enrolling for a conducting course at the Janáček Academy of Music in Brno. Apart from that, he took private lessons of singing and trombone. He completed his studies by obtaining a degree from Master Classes in Conducting, in Vienna. Following an initial brief engagement with the operetta, and subsequently, opera company of the National Theatre in Brno. In 1993 he became a laureate of the Franz Lehár International Singing Competition in Komárno, Slovakia. From 1995 – 2003 he was a conductor of the Prague National Theatre Opera, where he conducted productions of Smetana’s Two Widows and The Kiss; Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci; Il Barbiere di Siviglia; Tosca; La Bohème; La traviata; Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, and other operas. Beyond that, he mounted his own productions there, as music director, of Shostakovich’s The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (2000), and John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer (2003). He has collaborated as a guest with the opera companies of Ljubljana, Slovenia, as well as in Taiwan, Japan, Greece, Austria, Germany, Russia, and other countries. He has worked with leading Czech orchestras (the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, the Prague Symphony Orchestra, the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Prague Chamber Orchestra, the Prague Philharmonia, and others). In his capacity as the principal conductor of the Moravia Philharmonic Orchestra in Olomouc (since 2002), he made a successful appearance at the Prague Spring International Festival in 2000, presenting in Prague’s Smetana Hall his account of Zdeněk Fibich’s melodrama, The Death of Hippodamia. In one of his occasional excursions to the world of popular music, in 1994 he mounted the first ever Czech production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, Jesus Christ Superstar, and conducted its performances on 250 nights. František Preisler died on 30 July 2007.