Jan Mach

After attending the local music school in Jilemnice (north Bohemia), he studied at the Brno Conservatory with Professor Lubomír Bartoň and graduated from the Academy of Performing Art in Prague, where he attended the classes of Vlastimil Mareš and Jiří Hlaváč. He later also started teaching there. He has competed masterclass courses in Semmering (Austria), Telč (Czech Republic) and Aix en Provence (France) and a six-month study stay in Karlsruhe (Germany) with professors Otto Kronthaler and Wolfgang Meyer.

He joined the opera ensemble of the F. X. Šalda Theatre in Liberec (north Bohemia), later played in the State Opera in Prague and was a member of the Prague Symphony Orchestra for 10 years. In 1993, he won the 1^st prize at a competition in Kroměříž and later received the Leoš Janáček Foundation Award for the best conservatory graduate. He was in the final round of Jeunesses Musicales Romania and succeeded in the ARD International Music Competition in Munich in 2003. As a soloist, he collaborates with the Munich Chamber Orchestra, Inter Camerata and the Prague Symphony Orchestra. He premiered and recorded Jindřich Feld’s clarinet quintet with the Pražák Quartet and often performs with the Zemlinski Quartet with which he recorded the works by F. V. Kramář.

In 2003, he formed the Trio Arundo with oboist Jan Souček and bassoonist Václav Vonášek and later won the Czech Chamber Music Society Prize with them. He plays the bass clarinet in the clarinet ensemble Five Star Quartet with his colleagues from the Academy of Performing Arts. He had led masterclass courses in Žirovnice (Czech Republic), Vardø (Norway) and Wroclaw (Poland).