About Our Orchestra

Smecky Music Studios are home to City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra & Chorus, which is a world-renown professional symphony orchestra, founded over 30 years ago. The orchestra features the selection of the finest musicians from all of the main Czech orchestras.

The orchestra started out, just after the end of World War II, as the in-house orchestra for the huge Barrandov Film Studios, regularly playing music for film and animation productions made at the world famous Barrandov studios, as well as featuring in the historic Krátký Film productions (meaning “short film,” in Czech), and productions for the former Czechoslovak Television.

At that time the orchestra was known as “Filmový Symfonický Orchestr” (FISYO / The Film Symphony Orchestra). Many wonderful national and international film scores were recorded by this orchestra up until 1989, mostly at Smecky Music Studios.

Fully privatized after the Velvet Revolution, the orchestra was given its new name by music producer James Fitzpatrick in 1992. Today the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, under the ownership and management of Josef Pokluda (the Smecky Music Studios owner), selects the finest musicians from all of the main Czech orchestras, who continue to play and record music together for every type of orchestral project including CD albums, international films, television series, games, theatre, commercials and even ringtones – both for the Czech Republic market but chiefly for clients media productions all around the world.

After the acclaim of our various recordings the orchestra have undertaken numerous European concerts of film and TV music, BBC Planet Earth music and Video Games Live, as well as standard classical repertoire. We also frequently play concerts in Prague and also have travelled to China, the Lebanon, various other Middle Eastern countries and concerts in Santiago, Chile with conductor Nic Raine and guest artist Itzhak Perlman.