Gilles Ledure studied musicology at the universities of Leuven and Paris. Since 2011 he is the general manager of the Brussels cultural house Flagey. He started his career in the music world in Belgium at La Monnaie/De Munt and with the Belgian National Orchestra. In 2006 he headed abroad, first to Luxemburg to lead the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg and shortly afterwards to France, where he was artistic director of the Orchestre National de Lille and the Lille Piano Festival until 2011. In 2003 he founded Tactus (Young Composers’ Forum), the non-profit organization that supports young composers in the creation and performance of orchestral works in collaboration with various cultural institutions. Particularly attentive to the training of young talents, Gilles Ledure is on the Board of Directors of the Queen Elisabeth Competition and the Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel and is a member of the Artistic Council of the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel. In 2014 he received the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in France, for his contribution to cultural and artistic relations between Belgium and France. Since 2019, he is President of the Jury of the Queen Elisabeth Competition’s instrumental sessions.

Gautier Capuçon is a true twenty-first century ambassador for the cello. He performs internationally with many leading conductors and instrumentalists and is the founder and leader of the ‘Classe d’Excellence de Violoncelle’ at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and a passionate ambassador for the Association Orchestre à l’École, which introduces thousands of children to classical music in schools throughout France. This year, he launched his own foundation to support talented young musicians at the beginning of their careers, and to increase his engagement with young artists. During the summer of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, Gautier Capuçon brought music directly into the lives of families across France with his musical odyssey, Un été en France. Devoted to exploring and expanding the cello repertoire, he performs a large range of pieces and new works every year. His current projects include collaborations with Lera Auerbach, Richard Dubugnon, Danny Elfman, and Thierry Escaich. This season sees him perform with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra. He is an artist in residence at both the Philharmonie de Paris and the Wiener Konzerthaus.

Myung-Wha Chung has been a soloist, chamber music partner, and teacher for more than sixty years. She trained at the Juilliard School under Leonard Rose and later at the University of Southern California under Gregor Piatigorsky. She has been a guest at many well-known festivals, such as the Lucerne Festival, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the Spoleto Festival, and the Tivoli Festival, and has performed all over the world, including at the White House, at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, and in the United Nations General Assembly Hall. Her solo recordings and her recordings as part of the Chung Trio (with her sister, the violonist Kyung-Wha Chung, and her brother, the conductor and pianist Myung-Whun Chung) have been released by the Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, and EMI labels. In recent years, she has directed the Pyeongchang (formerly Great Mountains) Music Festival and has organised festivals in Korea as well as in the US, Germany, and Austria. She has commissioned and premiered many original works, mostly by Korean composers. She performs and teaches children at the Maestra Chung Myung-Wha Music Village in Pyeongchang and elsewhere in Korea. In addition to her career as a performer, Myung-Wha Chung has also taught at the Mannes School of Music and at the Korea National University of Arts. She was awarded the Korean National Order of Cultural Merit by the Korean government.

Born in the UK, Natalie Clein made a name for herself at the age of sixteen when she won both the Eurovision Young Musicians in Warsaw and the title of BBC Young Musician of the Year. She received the ‘Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Rosebowl award’ from the Royal College of Music in London, then completed her studies under Heinrich Schiff in Vienna. She records regularly for Hyperion, her recordings have won a Diapason d'Or, and she has also recorded 3 discs for EMI. In 2021, she was named Officer of the Order of the British Empire for her services to music. Natalie Clein has been invited to work with major orchestras worldwide, including Philharmonia, Hallé, Bournemouth Symphony, City of Birmingham Symphony, Montreal Symphony, Orchestre National de Lyon, New Zealand Symphony, Opole Philharmonic, St Petersburg Symphony, and Orquesta Filarmónica de Buenos Aires. She performs regularly with conductors including Sir Mark Elder, Sir Roger Norrington, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Leonard Slatkin or José Serebrier, and with artists such as Marianna Shirinyan, Christian Ihle Hadland, Håvard Gimse, Anthony Marwood, Leif Ove Andsnes, and Cedric Pescia. She has also collaborated with Martha Argerich, Ian Bostridge, Simon Keenlyside, Imogen Cooper, Lars Vogt, Isabelle Faust, and Yeol Eum Son. A fervent advocate for contemporary music, Natalie Clein has premiered works by Sir John Tavener, Charlotte Bray, Brian Elias, and Thomas Larcher. She has also taken part in multidisciplinary projects with the dancer Carlos Acosta, the writer Jeanette Winterson, and the film-maker Deborah Warner. She is professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Rostock and at the Royal College of Music in London.

Roel Dieltiens is a Belgian cellist of world renown. From the very beginning of his career, his forceful personality and unconventional approach won him engagements in major international venues. He has also won international fame as a chamber musician and as the founder of the Ensemble Explorations. The numerous recordings he has made, particularly for Harmonia Mundi, have received international awards and are often regarded as reference recordings. Since 2010, he has performed in a trio with the fortepianist Andreas Staier and the violinist Daniel Sepec. While most of his activity is devoted to the baroque and classical repertoires on period instruments, he also plays the modern cello. He has successfully tackled the Romantic repertoire (Mendelssohn, Dvořák and Rossini) and the modern repertoire (in particular, Kodály and Martinů). His curiosity led him to retrieve forgotten compositions from under the dust (Servais, Franchomme a.o.) and generated flourishing collaborations with composers such as Victor Legley, William Bolcom and Luc Van Hove. Since 2002, Roel Dieltiens has been leading the cello class at the Hochschule der Künste in Zürich.

A precocious talent, Anne Gastinel began her studies at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Lyon at the age of eleven. She then perfected her craft under the guidance of Yo-Yo Ma, János Starker, and Paul Tortelier. She has won many prizes at major international competitions (Scheveningen, Prague, and Rostropovich), and was finally revealed to the public with the Eurovision Young Musicians Competition in 1990. In 1997, she was chosen by Marta Casals Istomin to play Pablo Casals’ legendary Matteo Goffriller cello for a year. In 2006, Anne Gastinel was awarded the Victoire de la Musique in the ‘Solo instrumentalist’ category. Her career now takes her to the world’s greatest concert venues, where she has performed alongside great masters such as Yehudi Menuhin, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Kurt Sanderling. It is during these travels that she meets the musicians and composers with whom she loves to have artistic exchanges : Emmanuel Krivine, Daniele Gatti, Pinchas Steinberg, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Michel Plasson. As a chamber musician, she performs with Claire Désert, the Quatuor Hermès, Nicholas Angelich, and Andreas Ottensamer, and with David Grimal and Philippe Cassard. Over the past fifteen years or so, her recordings have received some of the highest distinctions, including Classica magazine’s ‘Choc’ and a ‘Diapason d’Or’. Her most recent album, released by Naïve in 2021, is devoted to Chopin, performed in duo with Claire Désert. Anne Gastinel has taught at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Lyon since 2003.

An experienced soloist and a keen chamber musician and teacher, Marie Hallynck studied under Reine Flachot, Edmond Baert, János Starker, and Natalia Gutman. A laureate of the Eurovision Young Musicians Competition in 1992 and of the Juventus Foundation, and a Rising Star of the ECHO network in 2000, she was selected as Musician of the Year by the Belgian music press in 2002. She has performed with many prestigious ensembles, including the St Petersburg Philharmonic, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the Concertgebouw Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestre National de Lille, and the Belgian National Orchestra. On concert and on disc, she has been an enthusiastic advocate of the Belgian repertoire (including Lekeu, Vieuxtemps, Jongen, Huybrechts, and Brossé). In a duo with the pianist Cédric Tiberghien, she has made a number of memorable recordings (of Grieg, Schumann, Debussy, Britten, and Bacri). In 2006, together with the pianist Muhiddin Dürrüoglu and the clarinettist Ronald Van Spaendonck, she founded the Kheops Ensemble, which has given her the opportunity to tackle a broad range of chamber music in a variety of line-ups. Marie Hallynck has been teaching at the Royal Brussels Conservatory since she was nineteen.

Frans Helmerson first studied his instrument under Guido Vecchi in Gothenburg, before going on to further studies under Giuseppe Selmi in Rome and William Pleeth in London. He also benefited from the advice and encouragement of Rostropovich and Celibidache. In 1971, he won the Cassado Competition in Florence. His career as a soloist has taken him to every continent. He has had fruitful collaborations with great conductors such as Seiji Ozawa, Colin Davis, Neeme Järvi, Evgeni Svetlanov, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Herbert Blomstedt, Sergiu Comissiona, Kurt Sanderling, and Mstislav Rostropovich. His recordings of the Dvořák and Shostakovich concertos are regarded as benchmarks. He is also a keen chamber musician and performs regularly at festivals, including the Verbier, the Pablo Casals, and the Ravinia festivals. From 1994 to 2001, he was artistic director of the Korsholm Music Festival in Finland. He founded the Michelangelo String Quartet in 2002 with Mihaela Martin, Stephan Picard, and Nobuko Imai. Frans Helmerson teaches at the Kronberg Akademie and is a Guest Professor at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin.

Born in Finland, Anssi Karttunen was taught by Erkki Rautio, William Pleeth, Jacqueline du Pré, and Tibor de Machula. An enthusiastic advocate of contemporary music, his collaborations with a number of composers have contributed to the development of the instrument’s technique ; many of them, including Salonen, Lindberg, Saariaho, Tan Dun, Wallin, Dusapin and Jolas, have written works for him. Karttunen has premiered more than 190 works. His curiosity knows no limits, whether in terms of instruments (he enjoys playing the baroque cello, the piccolo and even electric cello) or of repertoire. His very varied discography includes countless contemporary works, as well as the Beethoven sonatas on period instruments. He loves making transcriptions and arrangements. He has been solo cellist with the London Sinfonietta and founded a string trio, the Zebra Trio. From 1994 to 1998, he was artistic director of the Avanti ! Chamber Orchestra. He directed the Helsinki Biennale in 1995 and 1999 and the Musica Nova Helsinki festival in 2015. Anssi Karttunen lives in Paris, where he teaches at the École Normale de Musique.

Mischa Maisky is the only cellist to have studied successively with Mstislav Rostropovitch and with Gregor Piatigorsky. Born in Latvia, he grew up in Russia and then emigrated to Israel. He has collaborated with leading conductors, including Bernstein, Maazel, Mehta, Muti, Ashkenazy, Barenboim, Jansons, Dutoit and Dudamel. Among his regular chamber music partners are Martha Argerich, Radu Lupu, Nelson Freire, Evgeny Kissin, Itzhak Perlman, Lang Lang, Peter Serkin, Gidon Kremer, Yuri Bashmet, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Vadim Repin, Maxim Vengero, Joshua Bell, Julian Raclin and Janine Jansen. An exclusive artist for Deutsche Grammophon for 30 years, he has made more than 35 recordings, notably with the philharmonic orchestras of Vienna, Berlin and Israel, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. This extensive discography has earned him numerous distinctions such as the Record Academy Prize in Tokyo, the Echo Deutscher Schallplattenpreis, the Grand Prix du Disque in Paris, the Diapason d’Or de l’Année and several Grammy Award nominations. Mischa Maisky has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Istanbul Music Festival, the Honorary Fellow Award from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, and the Honorary Membership from the Royal Academy of Music, and was made an Honorary Academician by the Accademia di Santa Cecilia.

Antonio Meneses was born into a family of musicians in Recife in Brazil in 1957. He started to study the cello at the age of ten and studied under Antonio Janigro in Düsseldorf and later in Stuttgart. He won the first prize at the Munich Competition in 1977 and at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1982, and had the honour of being loaned Pablo Casals’s cello. He is frequently invited to perform with the greatest orchestras all over the world and has played under the most eminent conductors, including Karajan (with whom he recorded Don Quichotte by Richard Strauss and the Brahms Double Concerto), Abbado, Muti, Chailly, Rostropovich, Jansons, Masur, Temirkanov, and Thielemann. A keen chamber musician, Antonio Meneses was a member of the famous Beaux Arts Trio for ten years and plays regularly in a duo with Maria-João Pires. His extensive discography includes the complete Beethoven sonatas (with Menahem Pressler) and the complete works for cello of his compatriot Heitor Villa-Lobos. He gives masterclasses in Europe (at the Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía in Madrid and at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena), Canada, and Japan. He teaches at the Musikhochschule in Berne since 2008.

Winner of the Avery Fisher Recital Award, the Piatigorsky Memorial Award, and the Pro Musicis Award, and nominated for the Grammy Awards, Sharon Robinson regularly performs as a soloist, with orchestras, and as a chamber music partner, with ensembles such as the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio. With her husband, the violinist and conductor Jaime Laredo, she recently premiered André Previn’s Double Concerto, together with the Austin, Cincinnati, Detroit, Kansas City, and Toronto orchestras, the Pacific Symphony, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie. In 2009, Sharon Robinson and Jaime Laredo became artistic co-directors of the Linton Chamber Music Series in Cincinnati. They are also artistic directors of the Hudson Valley Chamber Music Circle at Bard College and Artistic Advisors at the Brattleboro Music Center in Vermont. Sharon Robinson has made many recordings, both as a soloist and with the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio. Recently, BRIDGE Records released Triple Doubles, an album featuring three new double concertos written for Sharon Robinson and Jaime Laredo by Daron Hagen, Richard Danielpour, and David Ludwig, and Schubert’s complete trios with the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio. In 2012, she joined the faculty of the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Jian Wang began learning the cello from his father at the age of four and went on to study at the Shanghai Conservatory. Noticed and encouraged by Isaac Stern during the filming of From Mao to Mozart, he enrolled at Yale School of Music in 1985 and studied under Aldo Parisot. Since then, he has played with many prestigious orchestras, including the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Koninklijk Concertgebouw Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the BBC orchestras, the Zürich orchestra, the La Scala orchestra, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Orchestre National de France, the Orchestre de Paris, and the NHK Symphony Orchestra. He has performed under conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Paavo Järvi, Riccardo Chailly, Charles Dutoit, Christoph Eschenbach, Myung-Whun Chung, Alan Gilbert, and Gustavo Dudamel. He has made numerous recordings, including Elgar’s Concerto with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Vladimir Ashkenazy, an album of short pieces for cello and guitar entitled Rêverie, Bach’s Cello Suites, the Double Concerto by Brahms with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Claudio Abbado, and Gil Shaham, and Haydn’s Concertos with the Gulbenkian Orchestra conducted by Muhai Tang.

Sonia Wieder-Atherton was born in San Francisco to a Romanian mother and an American father. She studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris under Maurice Gendron, then at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory under Natalia Shakhovskaya. She is a laureate of the Rostropovich Cello Competition. She has had works written for her by contemporary composers, such as Pascal Dusapin, Georges Aperghis, Betsy Jolas and Wolfgang Rihm. She has performed as a soloist with the Orchestre de Paris, the Orchestre National de France, the Belgian National Orchestra, the Liège Royal Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, the NDR orchestra in Hanover, and Les Siècles, and performs regularly with musicians such as Imogen Cooper and Raphaël Oleg. In recent years, she has developed many original projects, for which she has collaborated with Chantal Akerman, Charlotte Rampling and Fanny Ardant, among others. In 2011, she was awarded the Prix Francine et Antoine Bernheim pour les Arts, les Lettres et les Sciences. In 2015, she was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. On 1 July 2018, Sonia Wieder-Atherton performed as part of the ‘Hommage solennel de la Nation’ tribute to Simone Veil at the Panthéon. Her recordings were released by Alpha Classics.