Biography
Nikol Kraft is currently studying conducting at the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno under Jan Zbavitel. For 2017 she was awarded a scholarship to study at Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna. She participated as conductor in a staging of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in a JAMU Chamber Opera production in 2013. In the following year she appeared in the Janáček Brno International Festival 2014 with her own musical preparation of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, which was very positively reviewed by the journal Opernwelt. She was assistant conductor in the Brno National Theatre for the preparation of the world premiere of the opera Alice in Bed (2014) by composers Ivo Medek and Markéta Dvořáková and for the preparation of Puccini’s Tosca (2015) and Janáček´s Jenůfa (2015). She has conducted the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra (recording Tchaikovsky´s symphonic ballad Voyevoda for Czech Radio), the Brno Philharmonic (concerts also included Prokofiev´s Romeo and Juliet suite and Dvořák´s Symphony No. 8) and the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra, among others. She has completed courses with conductors Tomáš Netopil and Zsolt Nagy. She was awarded a Bayreuther Festspiele scholarship in 2014. She is a graduate with a special concentration on music of Prague‘s Jan Neruda Gymnasium, where she studied organ. She graduated in musicology from the Charles University Faculty of Arts in Prague. As part of her studies she also completed a semester internship at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, where she completed her dissertation titled Rafael Kubelík’s Aesthetic Positions in the Light of Sources in Munich.