Jitka Čechová has won numerous awards for her excellency as a pianist, and she is regularly invited to major music venues and festivals. Critics appreciate her intense depth of expression, the spontaneous joy in her play, the cultivated precision of her strokes augmented by her fantastic virtuosity and delicate detailing. Chamber music forms an essential part of her musical identity, and she plies herself to it with full emotional intensity as a pianist of the Smetana Trio, one of the most prestigious Czech ensembles of today. However, her performances are also vividly marked by the technical brilliance of her experience as a soloist.

Jitka Čechová is a proud promoter of the Czech musical tradition both at home and abroad. Czech compositions also make up the entire programme of her recital for Influencers of Resonance. The audience can look forward to works by Vítězslav Novák, Josef Páleníček, Jaroslav Ježek, and Leoš Janáček. One of the composers closest to her heart is Bedřich Smetana. In 2014 she finished the as-yet most complete recording of his piano works ever for Supraphon. Diapason dubbed the set of eight CDs a “perfect recording whose quality is well worth the discovery of this unfairly neglected repertoire”, while the Austrian press lauded the project as “a major music event” and an experience that truly “works wonders with sound”. Smetana’s oeuvre was also the focus of her two concerts at the world-famous Edinburgh International Festival. However, she is not impartial to contemporary repertoire either. For example, one of the most prominent Czech composers of the twentieth century, Zdeněk Lukáš, dedicated his third piano concerto to her, which she premiered to much acclaim when touring Germany with the SWR Symphonieorchester conducted by Petr Altrichter. 

Jitka Čechová graduated from the Prague Conservatoire (under Prof. Jan Novotný) and studied under Prof. Peter Toperczer at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Her musical style developed intensely during her post-graduate studies with Eugen Indjic in Paris and Vitali Berzon in Freiburg. She gained further experience at masterclasses by Rudolf Kehrer in Weimar, Eugen Indjic and Lazar Berman in Piešťany. She has performed with the Bamberg Symphony, the Prague Philharmonia, the Durban Symphony Orchestra, the Südwestdeutsche Philharmonie Konstanz, the Prague Symphony Orchestra, or the Munich Symphony Orchestra, among others. Her mastery of the piano has been on display at festivals the likes of the Prague Spring, the Janáček May, Ticino Musica, and at events in Baden-Baden, Graz, or Paris.

Besides winning numerous prizes at world-class piano competitions, she has is also the laureate of multiple awards for superb recordings. For example, as a member of the Smetana Trio, she received the prestigious BBC Music Magazine Award for a recording of Bohuslav Martinů’s music in 2017. She has recorded Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1, Listz’s Totentanz, Dvořák’s Piano Concerto in G minor, the triple concertos of Voříšek and Beethoven, or the complete concertos of Clara and Robert Schumann. She recently concluded the recording of the complete piano concertos of Josef Páleníček and is currently taking part in the unique complete recording of the 550 sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti for Czech Radio.

Jitka Čechová has also held masterclasses in recent years, hosted in Prague, London, at the Northern College of Music in Manchester, Campos do Jordao in Brazil, Colburn School University in Los Angeles, Eau Claire in Wisconsin, and in Luxembourg.