The composer, conductor and violinist Ondřej Kukal was born on 14 August 1964 in Prague. He graduated from the Faculty of Music at the AMU in Prague, where he studied violin with Professor Josef Vlach and composition with Jindřich Feld. By performing his violin concerto, he rounded off his composition studies and ended his conducting with a performance of his own Danse symphonique for large orchestra.
In 1985–1995 he was a member of the New Vlach Quartet (later the Vlach Quartet). In 1991–1996, he was the chief conductor of the South Bohemian Chamber Philharmonic. In 1996–1999, Ondřej Kukal was the permanent conductor of the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra, and from 2001 to 2012 he was the chief conductor of the Hradec Králové Philharmonic. He was the concertmaster of the Prague Chamber Orchestra (1996–2003), with whom he performed at the Lincoln Center in New York, the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, and the Musikverein in Vienna, among others. During his career to date, he has stood at the conductor’s stand desk of the Czech Philharmonic, Prague Symphony Orchestra FOK, Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra Ostrava, Czech Chamber Orchestra, and others.
Most of his compositions (more than 30 opus numbers) are published and regularly interpreted at home and abroad. In 1999, the Bavarian government granted him a scholarship, within the framework of which he composed his Symphony No. 1, Op. 15, which received the OSA annual award in 2005. His String Quartet No. I one-movement – won the prize in the Generation composition competition (1989) and the concerto for clarinet Clarinettino the Classic prize (1994).