František Zahradníček

Biography

A graduate of the Academy of Music in Prague, where he studied under the tutelage of Ivan Kusnjer. He debuted at the National Theatre in 2000 as Masetto in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Since then he has portrayed many roles, for example, Mozart’s Figaro (Le nozze di Figaro), Leporello (Don Giovanni), Papageno (Die Zauberflöte) and Don Alfonso (Cosi fan tutte), Colline (Puccini: La boheme), Zuniga (Bizet: Carmen), Rossini's Don Basilio (Il barbiere di Siviglia) and Don Magnifico (La Cenerentola), Smetana’s Chrudoš (Libuše), Dvořák’s Marbuel (The Devil and Kate), The Gamekeeper, Hunter and Water Sprite (Rusalka) and Filip (The Jacobin) and Goryanchikov (Janáček: From the House of the Dead). He has also performed at State Opera Prague. František Zahradníček has been a guest at four editions of the opera festival in Wexford, Ireland, where he has sung Malvolio in Friedrich Flotow’s Alessandro Stradella and appeared in Pavel Haas’s The Charlatan and Tchaikovsky’s The Maid of Orleans. At Teatro Lirico di Cagliari he performed in Tchaikovsky’s opera The Slippers. He appeared on the stage of Teatro National Sao Carlo in Lisbon as Harašta in Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen. With the National Theatre Opera he has made several tours of Japan, mainly performing in titular Mozart roles. He has performed with a number of renowned orchestras, including the Prague Philharmonia, Prague Symphony Orchestra, Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra, Pardubice Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra and Bohuslav Martinů Philharmonic Orchestra, both at home and abroad. In 2002 he sang at New York’s Carnegie Hall at a concert to honour the victims of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack. The conductors he has collaborated with include Jiří Bělohlávek, Libor Pešek, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Leopold Hager, Asher Fish, John Fiore, Enrico Dovico and Ondrej Lenárd. He has performed in productions by the directors Jiří Menzel, Ondřej Havelka and Yuri Alexandrov.