Count Eugène Traey (1915-2006) was born in Amsterdam of Belgian parents and studied music at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Antwerp, where his piano teacher was Emmanuel Durlet. He went on to study in Paris under Robert Casadesus and in Germany under Karl Leimer and Walter Gieseking. After this international training as a pianist, Eugène Traey pursued a career both as a concert performer and a teacher at the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp, of which he was the director until 1980. He gave recitals, performed with orchestras and took part in chamber music recitals with Arthur Grumiaux and Jean Laurent, as well as performing piano duos with Frédéric Gevers. He was the founder of the deSingel concert hall in Antwerp and was a regular member of juries at international competitions (Moscow, Warsaw, Munich and Tokyo, among others). From 1982 until 1995 Eugène Traey presided over the jury of the Queen Elisabeth Competition.

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.

Dutch-born Belgian composer of stage, orchestral, chamber, choral, and piano works; however, Frédéric Devreese is best known for his many memorable film scores and for his conducting. He received his first musical training from his father and then studied in Brussels (composition with Marcel Poot and conducting with René Defossez). He went on to study composition at the Accademia Santa Cecilia in Rome and conducting at the Wiener Staatsakademie. At the age of nineteen, he received the Prize of the Town of Ostend for his Piano Concerto No. 1. In 1983, his Piano Concerto No. 4 was the compulsory work for the Queen Elisabeth Competition. Devreese has received several national and international awards, including the Prix Italia for his TV opera Willem van Saeftinghe, the Georges Delerue Award, the Plateau Music Award (twice) for his film music, and the Klara-Carrièreprijs (2006). As a conductor, he has made a number of recordings for the Naxos Anthology of Flemish Music, for which he was nominated Cultural Ambassador of Flanders in 1996-97.

Klaus Huber studied composition with his godfather Willy Burkhard in Zurich and with Boris Blacher in Berlin. In 1959 he had his international breakthrough as a composer with the first performance of the chamber cantata Des Engels Anredung an die Seele at the World Music Days of the IGNM in Rome.

From 1964 to 1973 he directed the composition class at the Academy of Music in Basel. In the same period he was director of the composition seminars at the Gaudeamus Foundation in The Netherlands. In 1969 he founded the international composers’ seminar in the Künstlerhaus Boswil (Switzerland). From 1973 to 1990 he lead the composers’ class and of the Institute for contemporary music at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg, after which he started working exclusively as a guest professor.

In 1970 he received the Beethovenpreis of the city of Bonn (for Tenebrae), in 1978 the Art Prize of the city of Basel, in 2007 the European Church Music Prize by the city of Schwäbisch Gmünd and in 2009 the Music Prize Salzburg and the Ernst von Siemens-Musikpreis.

From 1979 to 1982 Klaus Huber was president of the Swiss Composers’ Association. He is member of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste, of the Akademie der Künste Berlin and of the Freie Akademie der Künste Mannheim, honorary member of the ISCM as well as honorary doctor of the University of Strasbourg.

Since 1975 his works have been published by Ricordi Munich. His collected writings were published in 1999 under the title Umgepflügte Zeit by the Cologne-based Verlag MusikTexte; unterbrochene Zeichen - Klaus Huber 2005 by PFAU Verlag, in Saarbrücken; a double volume (137/138) of Musik-Konzepte 2007, edition text + kritik; and the book Klaus Huber: Von Zeit zu Zeit, Das Gesamtschaffen, Gespräche mit Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, published by Wolke Verlag 2009.

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.

After studying at the Paris Conservatoire and privately with Raymond Gallois-Montbrun, Japanese composer Akira Miyoshi graduated in French literature from Tokyo University in 1960. The influence of Dutilleux on him is evident in the transformation of motifs in early works including the sonata for flute, cello and piano (1955). In such works as the Sinfonia concertante (1954), the Piano Concerto (1962) and the Concerto for Orchestra (1964), Akira Miyoshi's individual technique of motif transformation, which at times evokes the incremental rhythms of Japanese traditional music, increasingly became a structural element. Many of his important works are for vocal forces. In Kogen-dansho (1955), En blanc (1962) and Duel (1964), atonal melodies follow the verbal intonation of Japanese. After the String Quartet no.2 (1967) his use of atonality has become more prominent, and he has experimented with graphic notation and unusual performance instructions. In his trilogy for chorus and orchestra, Requiem (1972), Psaume (1979) and Kyomon (1984), Miyoshi combines these elements with Japanese children's songs. Among his awards are four Otaka prizes for the Piano Concerto, the Concerto for Orchestra, the Cello Concerto (1974) and Kyomon.

Alexander Mullenbach (Luxembourg) studied piano, chamber music and composition at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. He has composed more than 60 works since 1978, 6 of them for large orchestra. His compositions appear at major festivals such as Salzburg in 1986, the Festival du Midem Classique in 1986, Styrian Autumn in 1987, Echternach in 1987 and 1989, the International Summer Academy of the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Musica Strasbourg in 1991 and Europa Musicale Munich in 1993.

He has also composed set pieces for international competitions, viz. the International Mozart Competition Salzburg in 1988 and the European Piano Competition in 1987. His works have been played by Heinrich Schiff, Roberto Szidon, Roberto Fabbricanti, Edda Silvestri, Gottfried Schneider, Irena Grafenauer, Elliot Fisk and the ensembles Musica Viva of Dresden and Alter Ego of Rome. Conductors of renown have conducted his symphonic works: Ernest Bour, Leopold Hager, Günther Neuhold, Hans Graf, Udo Zimmermann.

In parallel with his activity as a composer, Alexander Mullenbach has devoted himself intensively to teaching at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, where he presently is the Director of the Summer Academy, and the Conservatory in Luxembourg. He has given numerous concerts in Europe and Canada as a pianist, chamber musician and accompanist.

Luis de Pablo was born in Bilbao (Spain) in 1930 and started his musical studies very young. He then went on to study law at the University of Complutense in Madrid. Egged on by his interest in the most modern forms of art, Luis de Pablo, a lawyer at the time, endeavoured to complete his training through the personal and intense study of the major scores of the twentieth century ; practising composition in parallel as an autodidact. At the end of the 1950s, he gave up the law and started to have his works performed in public. In 1958, with Ramón Barcé, he set up the group Nueva Música, joined by Cristóbal Halffter. Since his early works of 1953, he has become renowned worldwide, maintaining his position as one of the foremost representatives of contemporary Spanish music. He is a teacher at the Madrid Conservatory and the founder of several ensembles and musical associations in his country. He has also been appointed visiting professor at a number of European and American universities. Most of his works, which total over a hundred, have been created outside his own country ; in Europe, America and Japan. They display a universal understanding of all musical genres and techniques anticipating new developments in contemporary music, and are integrated within a very personal means of expression which refuses to draw from the musical heritage of the past.

Rautavaara was born in Helsinki in 1928 and studied with Merikanto at the Helsinki Academy (1948-52), with Persichetti at the Juilliard School in New York (1955-56), and with Sessions and Copland at Tanglewood (1955). He first came to international attention in 1955 when the neo-classical A Requiem in Our Time for brass and percussion won the Thor Johnson Composer’s Competition in Cincinnati. He studied serialism and soon integrated twelve note techniques, without displacing his essential Romanticism. For instance, Symphony No.3 (1961) may be the first totally serial Finnish work, yet it is also a tribute to the symphonies of Bruckner, complete with Wagner tubas.

In the late 1960s Rautavaara distanced himself from serialism and his mystical character came more to the fore in music of rich colour and sweeping melodic profile, at once accessible and evocative. His operas have often explored issues of creativity and madness, such as Vincent (1986-87), Aleksis Kivi (1995-96) and Rasputin (2001-03), and his symphonies and concerti have increasingly been commissioned by orchestras outside his native Finland, including Symphony No.8 ‘The Journey’ (1999) for the Philadelphia Orchestra, a Harp Concerto (1999-2000) for the Minnesota Orchestra and a Clarinet Concerto (2001-02) for Richard Stoltzman and the National Symphony in Washington.

Recent works by Rautavaara include the orchestral work Tapestry of Life (2007), the concertos Incantations for percussionist Colin Currie (2008) and Towards the Horizon for cellist Truls Mork (2008-09), and Summer Thoughts (2008) toured by violinist Midori. His new Missa a cappella (2010-11) has performances scheduled in the Netherlands, Australia, the UK and Sweden.

Rautavaara's music has been recorded on the Ondine, Finlandia and Naxos labels and DVDs have been released of his operas The Gift of the Magi, Alexis Kivi and Rasputin.

Einojuhani Rautavaara is published by Boosey & Hawkes.