Starting from the 2025/26 season, the new Chief Conductor and Music Director of the Prague Symphony Orchestra will be the celebrated Czech conductor Tomáš Netopil. He will succeed his great colleague, present Chief Conductor of the orchestra, Tomáš Brauner

“Prague has always been an enormously rich source of culture and music for me. The Prague Symphony Orchestra, which continues to make an outstanding contribution towards this, is amongst the best Prague has to offer. It is a great honour and pleasure for me that our artistic paths shall cross and that together we will be able to develop the rich potential of this wonderful orchestra and bring joy to audiences in Prague as well as the rest of the Czech Republic and abroad. Our journey together represents a new and exciting artistic chapter for me,” said Tomáš Netopil, who is currently a Principal Guest Conductor at the Czech Philharmonic and until last season was also the general music director of the Aalto Musiktheater and Philharmonie Essen. He steps down from his post with the Czech Philharmonic at the end of the upcoming concert season.

The director of the Prague Symphony Orchestra Daniel Sobotka said: ​“I have been overjoyed with the direction of the Prague Symphony Orchestra over the past years and it has been an honour for me to help shape this direction with all my colleagues both on stage and behind the scenes. I believe that it makes sense for a Czech orchestra, not to mention an orchestra which is an ambassador for the city of Prague, to also have a Czech as its Chief Conductor and Music Director. […] We warmly welcome Tomáš Netopil to the Prague Symphony Orchestra.”

This is not Tomáš Netopil’s first time working with the Prague Symphony Orchestra. In fact, it was with the Prague Symphony Orchestra in 2008 that Tomáš Netopil made his first recording – Antonín Dvořák’s Carnival and Josef Suk’s Symphony in E major for the Supraphon label. He later followed up on this with an excellent recording of Smetana’s Má Vlast. They have also worked together on concert projects at the Municipal House, such as the world premiere of Jiří Gemrot’s Oboe Concerto and Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.