Marius Constant (1925-2004) was born in Bucharest and pursued a career as both composer and conductor. After he moved to Paris, he studied under Tony Aubin, Olivier Messiaen, Jean Fournet, Nadia Boulanger and Arthur Honegger. In addition to his work as a composer he was the co-founder of France Musique, of which he was the director from 1954 to 1966. From 1973 to 1988 he was the music director of dance at the Paris Opera. He spent one year teaching in California, at the invitation of Stanford University. In his capacity as an orchestral conductor he founded in 1963 Ars Nova, a contemporary music ensemble and he has also been invited to conduct the major orchestras in Europe, Canada, the United States and Japan. In addition, he has conducted in the opera houses of Paris, Berlin and Hamburg, as well as conducting at the Bolshoi in Moscow, the Metropolitan in New York and at Covent Garden in London. His compositions gained him several international prizes.

In the field of Modern and Contemporary music, Reinbert de Leeuw is widely know and a highly respected musician. Born in Amsterdam, Reinbert de Leeuw's musical activities cover a wide field: Conductor, composer and pianist. Since 1974 he has been conductor and music director of the Schönberg Ensemble. He is also author of a book on Charles Ives and a book with musical essays and has collaborated on 8 film documentary series of twentieth-century composers such as Messiaen, Ligeti, Gubaidulina, Vivier, Górecki shown on dutch television and which have won international acclaim.

Reinbert de Leeuw regularly conducts Holland's foremost orchestras and ensembles, including the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, New Sinfonietta Amsterdam, Residentie Orchestra The Hague and ensembles such as the Netherlands Chamber Choir, the ASKO and the Netherlands Wind ensembles and the orchestras of the Dutch Radio. He has toured and performed in festivals world wide. He was guest artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival (1992) and was artistic director of the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music (1994-1998). In the 1995-96 season he was the centre point of the 'Carte Blanche' series in the Concertgebouw Amster­dam. He is involved in the organization of the series 'Contemporaries' at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam.

He is a regular guest in most European countries (France, Germany (Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra) , England, Belgium) and the United States (Tanglewood Festival, New World Symphony, Lincoln Center Chamber Music Group New York, Aspen and the St. Paul’s Chamber Orchestra in Minneapolis, and lectures at the Juilliard School of Music in New York), Japan and Australia where he has served as artistic advisor for the contemporary music series of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra from 2000 up to 2004. During that period he has conducted several concerts in Sydney and the Brisbane Festival. Reinbert de Leeuw has been involved in various opera productions at the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam. His recent productions were Strawinsky (a.o. The Rake’s progress), Andriessen (Rosa, a Horse drama. Writing to Vermeer), Ligeti (Le Grand Macabre), Vivier (Rêves d’un Marco Polo) and Rob Zuiddam’s opera ‘Rage d‘Amours’.

At the Netherlands Opera he conducted the world premiere of Louis Andriessen’s new Opera La Commedia (2008) and Rob Zuidams new opera Adam in Exile (2009). In 2010, he conducted the new opera of Klaas de Vries at the National Touring Opera.

His recordings as a pianist have won many prizes, including the Dutch Edison, the Premio della critica discografica Italiana, the Grand Prix of the Hungarian Liszt Society and the Diapason D'Or. Some 30 recordings as a conductor have been brought out by Philips, teldec, DGG, Electra Nonesuch, Ovidis Montaigne and cover a wide range of repertoire by Messiaen, Strawinsky, Janacek, Liszt, Gubaidulina, Oestvolskaya, Schönberg, Webern, Vivier, Andriessen and Reich. In July 2006, the Schönberg Ensemble brought out a CD/DVD box documenting 30 years of their concerts and recordings on 25 CD’s and DVD’s, most of which are conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw. (Schönberg Ensemble Edition “A century of music in perspective”).

Reinbert de Leeuw has received the Sikkens Award (1991) and the prestigious '3M' prize (1992) and in 1994 was made Honorary Doctor at the University of Utrecht and is Professor at the University of Leiden.

Reinbert de Leeuw is co-founder and since 2001 artistic director of the Summer Academy, the international orchestra and ensemble academy of the National Youth Orchestra. For his performance of Messiaen’s “Des Canyons aux Etoiles”with the Summer Academy Orchestra in 2006, he received the ‘Angel’ for the best performance during the Edinburgh Festival.

André Laporte was was self-taught as a musician, quickly mastering the piano, clarinet and organ, while enthusiastically acquainting himself with modern music - as did his contemporary, Karel Goeyvaerts - through the radio programs of Paul Collaer, Louis De Meester, Vic Legley and David Van de Woestijne.

After completing secondary school he entered the Interdiocesan Higher Institute for Church Music (known as the Lemmens Institute) in Mechelen, where he studied under Edgard de Laet, Flor Peeters (organ) and Marinus De Jong (piano, counterpoint, fugue). Between 1953 and 1957 he was also a student at the Catholic University of Leuven, where he studied modern philosophy and musicology. He completed his studies in musicology with a comparative study of Ludus Tonalis and the Unterweisung im Tonsatz by Paul Hindemith. In 1953 he became a teacher of musical education and aesthetics at the Secondary Normal School of the St Thomas Institute (Middelbare Normaalschool van het Sint-Thomasinstituut) in Brussels. In this same period he composed his first works, folksong arrangements along the lines of Hindemith and Bartok, as well as a piano sonata and works for organ.

André Laporte became acquainted with the music of Schönberg, Stravinsky and Messiaen and was from 1960 to 1964 an annual participant at the Internationale Ferienkurse in Darmstadt, as well as the Kurse für Neue Musik in Cologne in 1964 and 1965. These courses gave him the opportunity to meet leading figures in the New Music movement (including Boulez, Maderna, Berio, Ligeti, Stockhausen, Kagel and Gielen). Like so many Belgian composers, he worked at the Belgian Radio (BRT, now VRT), first as a producer, later as a program coordinator, a production leader of the BRT Philharmonic Orchestra (1989) and ultimately as director of Artistic Ensembles (1993-1996), functions in which he was surrounded by such figures as D. Van de Woestijne, V. Legley, K. Goeyvaerts, L. De Meester, B. Buckinx, W. Westerlinck and L. Brewaeys. This position also gave him the chance to broadcast programs on “highlights of contemporary music” and “young Belgian performers”. Together with individuals from the Institute for Psycho-Acoustic and Electronic Music (IPEM), which had recently been set up by the BRT, he founded the SPECTRA work-group, which existed from 1963 to 1967.

André Laporte also won his spurs in music education. As early as 1968 he taught the New Techniques course at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels; this teaching position took on more solid form with his appointment as a teacher of music analysis, theory of musical form, harmony and counterpoint-fugue. In 1988 he became a teacher of composition, a position to which was added an appointment as teacher of composition at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Waterloo. Among his students may be mentioned Luc Brewaeys, Daniël Capelletti and Peter Swinnen.

In 1972, together with Herman Sabbe, he set up a new Belgian branch of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), of which he has remained the chairperson to this day.

André Laporte became a member of the Belgian Royal Academy for Sciences, Arts and Fine Art (1991), a member of the Flemish Music Board (Muziekraad voor Vlaanderen) and assistant chairperson of the Association of Belgian Composers (Unie van Belgische Componisten). He has won numerous prizes. Besides the Lemmens-Tinel prize, he won the Prix Italia in 1976 for his oratorio La vita non è sogno. The premiere of this work at the Flanders Festival in 1972 in Ghent attracted the attention of festival assistant Gerard Mortier, who as intendant at La Monnaie in Brussels would subsequently invite him to write an opera. His work has been performed both in Belgium and abroad; in particular, his Kafka opera, Das Schloss, was premiered at La Monnaie in 1986 and received its German premiere in the Saarländisches Staatstheater in Saarbrücken in 1991.

Born in Jette (Brussels) in 1932, Jacques knight Leduc studied at the Royal Music Conservatory of Brussels. He learend composition under the guidance of Jean Absil and was awarded the Rome Prize in 1961.
Other composition prizes have also marked his career: the annual competition of the Belgian Royal Academy, the Agniez Prize, the Prize of the Brabant District, the international competition G.B. Viotti (Vercelli - Italy), the Fuerison Prize, the Koopal prize, the SABAM prize at the international composition competition for string quartet in Liège, and the international composition competition for guitar Castelnuovo-Tedesco (Ancona - Italy).
Jacques Leduc wrote more than 75 symphonicworks, concertanti, chamber music works and solo pieces, including a concerto for piano, which was the compulsory work for the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 1972.
Director of the Music Academy of Uccle (from 1962 to 1983), Jacques Leduc was also professor at the Royal Music Conservatory of Brussels (from 1957 to 1997) and rector of the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel (from 1976 to 2004). He is president of the Belgian society of authors, composers and music editors (SABAM) and president of the Union of Belgian composers.
As an elected member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium, he has assumed the presidency of it since 1992.

Marcel Quinet (1915-1986) attended the music academy of his native town Binche before completing his studies at the Royal Conservatory of Mons. By 1934, he entered the Royal Music Conservatory of Brussels where he earned several successes: a first prize in fugue (Prix Gevaert, 1938), Master Degree in piano (Prix Ella Olin, 1942), a composition prize (Prix Agniez, 1946), etc.

Marcel Quinet studied with major teachers such as Fernand Quinet (harmony), Léon Jongen (fugue), and Marcel Maas (piano). He learnt composition with Léon Jongen and more particularly with Jean Absil.

In 1945, he was awarded the Premier Grand Prix de Rome for his cantata “La Vague et le Sillon”. This marked the start of his career as a composer. He received a Second Prize at the Queen Elisabeth Composition Competition, with his “Variation pour Orchestre” (1957). In 1959, the CeBeDeM awarded Marcel Quinet the Prize of Composition Emile Doehaert for his “Divertimento”. He received the Prix de l’Union de la Presse Musicale Belge in 1964, the Prix Irma de la Hault in 1966, la bourse Koopal in 1970, le Prix SABAM in 1972 and the Prix de la Fondation Darche in 1978.

He first taught at the Academy of Binche (1939-1943) before teaching piano at the Academy of Etterbeek (1941-1969). As of 1943, he was piano lecturer at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels; he then became a professor of written harmony (1948-1959) and later fugue (1959-1979). In both Saint-Josse-Ten-Noode and Schaerbeek, he was director of the Music Academy (1951-1975); he repeatedly taught as a special and later associate professor of composition at the Chapelle Reine Elisabeth of Belgium (1968-1979). At the SABAM, he held the positions of managing-director (1976-1980) and chairman of the Mutual Aid and Solidarity Fund (1980-1986).

By 1959 he has become a well-known figure in 20th century music. «In Marcel Quinet’s first works, especially through Hindemith there were signs of a strong will to return to Bach. Elsewhere there are clear signs of his admiration for Bartok but Absil’s influence proved undoubtedly decisive in his works. This influence clearly materialised in the way he developed his melodies, in his elegant countrepoint writing and in his firm handling of orchestration. Quinet admirably succeeded in writing for piano. Above all, he enjoyed working out formal sets in which heightened sensibility was visible» wrote Robert Wangermée. In his creative work, Marcel Quinet assimilated the most radical novelties and integrated them into his own personal expression including various influences from Bartok, Stravinsky and the Viennese School. Although he has started with tonal music, he later concentrated on plurimodality and non-serial atonal chromatic music. In 1969 he discovered the importance of the music of ancient Greece and more specially its metric structure, as his later works tend to show it.

He was appointed Correspondent in 1976 and later member in 1978 of Fine Arts Class at the Royal Academy of Belgium.

Marcel Quinet left behind hundreds of listed works, expressed in modern language, remarkably written in a very personal way without excess, with the refinement that was so typical of his expression.

Born in Padua, Claudio Scimone attended the course of orchestra conduction with Dimitri Mitropoulos and Franco Ferrara, and reached a worldwide reputation on the pulpit as symphonic and opera conductor working at Covent Garden in London, at the Arena Theatre in Verona, at La Fenice Theatre in Venice, for the Opera House of Rome at the Thermae of Caracalla, at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, at the Opera House of Zurich, New York, Paris, Macerata ("Sferisterio"), Houston, Melbourne, Aspen, etc. He conducted as well, during concerts or during recordings, the Philarmonia and the Royal Philharmonic of London, the Orchestras of the French Radio in Paris, the New York Mostly Mozart Orchestra and the New Japan Philharmonic of Tokyo, the Yomiuri Symphony Orchestra and the Bamberger Symphoniker, the English Chamber Orchestra, the Sydney Symphony, the Salzburger Mozarteum Orchestra and many others, from Toulouse to Strasburg, and from Montreal to Ottawa, Houston and Dallas, etc. He is honorary conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra of Lisbon.

Claudio Scimone has the merit of having executed the first modern unabridged performances (and the relevant CD or DVD records) of many works of Rossini, such as Mosè in Egitto, Maometto II (in both Neapolitan and Venetian versions, this last one on occasion of the opening celebrations of the newly restored Theatre La Fenice), Edipo a Colono (all these works for the Rossini Opera Festival of Pesaro) Zelmira, Armida, Ermione, the opera L'Italiana in Algeri (this performance with I Solisti Veneti, Marylin Horne, Sam Ramey, Kathleen Battle won the Los Angeles Grammy Award in 1980), as well as many others among which Le jugement dernier by Salieri, Il Nascimento dell'Aurora and Pimpinone by Albinoni, La caduta di Adamo by Galuppi, etc. The important premières of Orlando Furioso by Vivaldi (Verona, Teatro Filarmonico" and Paris, Châtelet, with I Solisti Veneti, Marylin Horne, and Victoria de Los Angeles, under the direction of Pierluigi Pizzi) let the world know the greatness of theatrical productions of Antonio Vivaldi.

In 1959 Claudio Scimone established in Padua the Group of I Solisti Veneti, that rapidly became a renowned Orchestra of Chamber Music, performing more than 5.500 concerts in more than 80 countries and in main International Music Festivals (among all, they held more than 30 concerts at Salzburg Festival). They recorded more than 350 works on CD, LP, DVD and published a very wide range of issues besides participating in many cultural, educational and promotional activities.

The discography of Claudio Scimone is very wide and it counts more than 350 titles for the major record companies worldwide (Erato - WEA, Philips, BMG - RCA, etc.), together with the various above mentioned orchestras, not to mention, of course, I Solisti Veneti. With I Solisti Veneti he recorded also the unabridged edition of the works of Vivaldi and Albinoni published during lifetime, the Symphonies of Mozart, and he brought to international success some masterpieces by big but forgotten compositors such as Giannella, Mercadante, Rolla, and others.

Together with I Solisti Veneti, Claudio Scimone performs a very important action in order to divulgate classical music among young people and in order to select a new public: I Solisti Veneti were the first orchestra in Italy to execute concerts in school premises. This activity had an enormous acknowledgement already in 1970 thanks to the victory in the music contest of Festivalbar obtained with more than 350.000 votes expressed by a young public.

Claudio Scimone cooperated with the Foundation Rossini of Pesaro in order to edit the opera omnia of Rossini and devoted himself with passion to the training of young musicians. He was teacher of Orchestral Training at the Conservatory of Venice and, and for 27 years, he was the Director of the Conservatory of Padua.

Among the great number of awards he received, there are the Grand Prix du Disque of the Paris Academie Charles Cros (several times), the Award of the Académie du Disque Lyrique and about thirty other awards. Claudio Scimone received from the Italian President of the Republic the honour of Cavaliere di Gran Croce and a golden medal for school, artistic and cultural merits. For the moment he is the only artist who received of the Regional Council of Veneto Region the award of Leone Veneto with unanimous vote. Claudio Scimone and I Solisti Veneti were assigned in 2008 at La Fenice Theatre in Venice the Prize A Life in music by the Foundation Arthur Rubinstein, assigned in the past to Rubinstein, Rostropovitch, Bernstein and, recently, to Pizzi, Raimondi, Mehta and Brendel.

Many composers dedicated to Claudio Scimone and to I Solisti Veneti works composed for them, starting in this way a new literature meant for 12 or more solo strings: among them there are Bussotti, Chailly, Constant, Corghi, De Pablo, De Pirro, Donatoni, Guaccero, Malipiero, Manzoni, Morricone, Scelsi and many others.