Lenka Filipová’s concert at the Brewery Garden will offer adaptations of famous compositions for classical guitar, folk songs, chansons and famous hits. The program will include songs from the new album OPPIDUM, which is the result of Lenka’s fourteen years of cooperation with British Celtic harp virtuoso Sean Barry. Lenka Filipová will also present a selection from the album of classical compositions which she is working on and she will remember the cooperation with Karel Zich with the song Mosty (Bridges), during which she will accompany herself on a 12-string guitar, which Karel Zich used to play long ago. Excellent singer and guitarist Lenka Filipová will perform with her guests Sean Barry, Jára Bárta and Robert Fischmann and with the Brno Strings octet, a group of outstanding musicians who focus on the interpretation of chamber music. The members of the ensemble are first players of Brno orchestras of the Janáček Opera Orchestra and Brno Philharmonic Orchestra and long-time members of chamber ensembles such as Czech Virtuosi, Czech Chamber Soloists, the quartet Incognito and the Slavonic Quartet.  

No intermission 

Lenka Filipová studied guitar at the Prague Conservatory under Professor Milan Zelenka. She was also attracted to the world of poetry and so she started interpreting Vitězslav Nezval’s poems by means of chansons. Guitar virtuoso and her friend Štěpán Rak helped her set the poems to music. She achieved success very soon and received the first offers. As a sixteen-year-old she went on tour in the USA and Canada with the Folk Music Instruments Orchestra of Brno. Her range of activities was already very rich at this time. She dedicated herself to singing and composing songs already at the time of her studies, she appeared in several programs of the Viola studio, she was a guest of music programs in different radios, acted as presenter on television and performed at the Semafor Theatre. There she also received the offer to participate in Karel Gott’s concert programs.  

She continued her studies in the field of classical guitar under the leadership of famous Uruguayan professor Oscar Caceres at the prestigious International Music Academy in Paris, a city which brought her great musical inspiration. There, besides classical guitar, she also managed to enter the local song community, upon recommendation of Hana Hegerová she managed to get contacts at the Parisian Olympia and signed a contract with the European music company CBS. Here recorded several songs and performed at the local music clubs, in the media etc.

A turning point for her was the meeting with French singer-songwriter Francis Cabrel. The song “Je l’aime à mourir” (in Czech “Zamilovaná”) which Cabrel composed and for which Zdeněk Rytíř wrote Czech lyrics, was recorded by Lenka Filipová in 1980 and it has been her greatest hit until today. Soon this recording became very popular both in the Czech Republic and in France. In 1981 this single appeared on her debut album of the same name, which subsequently received a Golden Award.

After returning from France she accepted the invitation to perform in Hana Zagorová’s program with the Karel Vágner Orchestra and then she performed with Karel Zich’s group Flop. She started singingforeign songs more and more often. Languages are her hobby – she speaks fluent French, English and Russian and is also interested in other languages. She has given concerts in a number of countries around the world, besides Europe she also visited Japan, the USA, Canada and Australia. At a guitar festival in the Netherlands Antilles she received the highly acclaimed Grand Prix.  

Besides her career of singer-songwriter, she still plays the classical guitar. It was, after all, the captivating tone of the guitar that brought her to music. In 1990 she released her first classical album titled Concertino and dedicated to guitar authors from different centuries. It contained guitar works and references to Vivaldi, Bach, Dowland, the classic of Spanish guitar Tárrega all the way to contemporary composer Milan Tesař. The project later had two more sequels and Lenka still brings it to life on concert stages. During her career she added the folk and electric guitar to her repertoire of instruments.  

She was regularly ranked in the top 10 in the Český slavík (Czech Nightingale) survey. For her album “Svět se zbláznil” (“The World Has Gone Mad”) she received the prize of the Academy of Popular Music. In 2003 she released the studio record “Tisíc způsobů, jak zabít lásku” (“A Thousand Ways to Kill Love”), which was to be the last one for quite some time. After that she dedicated herself above all to concert activities and several compilations with her greatest hits appeared on the market. A recording from her concert at the Masaryk Railway Station in Prague titled Concertino Live was released on CD and DVD in 2013. After meeting British Celtic harp virtuoso Sean Barry, she also started including Celtic ballads in her repertoire. And because they were positively acclaimed by viewers, the idea of making a separate album was born. She recorded and released this album under the title Oppidum in 2018. She also returned to concert stages with harmonic Celtic ballads after a difficult period in life.

“I realized it was important to enjoy life and above all  be myself,” she adds with the grace of an artist who is prospectively preparing another album of author songs with Czech lyrics and also a sequel to the successful project Concertino.