Ľubica Čekovská
The Slovak composer Ľubica Čekovská, born in 1975, first studied at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava and later at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where her teachers included Thomas Adès and Harrison Birtwistle. Her studies in Great Britain were accompanied by several awards and fellowships; in 2004 she won the Ján Levoslav Bella Prize for her new piano concerto in her homeland. Ľubica Čekovská has received numerous commissions for orchestral works, for example Adorations (world premiere in Bratislava, 2006), a Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (Altenburg, 2010), Four Movements for Piano (Prague, 2013) and Palingenia (Essen, 2015). Čekovská’s first opera Dorian Gray, based on the novel by Oscar Wilde, had its world premiere at the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava in 2013. She is equally successful as a composer of stage and film music, most recently for a documentary film about the Czechoslovak reformer Alexander Dubček.