Arie Van Lysebeth was the President of the Jury of the Queen Elisabeth Competition from 1996 to 2018. He took up the violin at the age of four. He completed his higher education at the Brussels Conservatory in music theory, bassoon, chamber music, and orchestral conducting. Following a competition, he was appointed bassoon soloist of the Belgian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra. Two years later, he came joint first in the Prague International Bassoon Contest. He also studied conducting under Bruno Maderna in Salzburg and under Pierre Boulez in Switzerland. Starting in 1970, he conducted the Flemish Chamber Orchestra, both in Belgium and abroad. As a guest conductor, he has appeared with the major Belgian orchestras as well as with symphony orchestras in the United States of America, Argentina, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany. He has performed with many famous soloists, including Igor Oistrakh, José Van Dam, Murray Perahia, and Augustin Dumay. From 1995 to 2004 he was the regular conductor of the Symphony Orchestra of the Brussels Conservatory, where he taught chamber music for many years (1970-1994) and served as director (1994-2003). From 2004 to 2014, he was the artistic director of the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel.

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.

After studying piano and composition at the Milan Conservatory, Luca Francesconi perfected his skills in Boston and Rome, under Stockhausen and Berio. He has been awarded a number of prizes: the International Gaudeamus Competition in 1984, the Martin Codax Prize in 1985, the Guido d’Arezzo Prize in 1985, the New Music Composer’s Competition and the Kranichstein Prize from Darmstadt in 1990. He was appointed visiting professor at the Rotterdam Conservatory in 1990-1991 and has taught composition at the Como Conservatory while also conducting. In 1990, he set up his own electronic music studio AGON, a production and musical research centre for new technologies. By broadening his musical universe to include other genres such as rock’n’ roll, jazz, cinema, and television, Luca Francesconi can confidently claim to have a global view of contemporary sounds. Among his works are three string quartets, two oboe concertos, the cycle Quatre études sur la mémoire (Memoria, Richiami, Richiami II, Riti neurali), Les Barricades mystérieuses, Trama, Etymo, Scene and the opera Ballata. At present he is professor and artistic director of composition at the Musikhögskolan of Malmö in Sweden.

With each newly created work, Michael Jarrell completes his musical self-portrait ; it reflects a constant quest for clarity and precision in his work as a composer.

Michael Jarrell studied composition with Eric Gaudibert in his native Geneva, attended various master classes at Tanglewood and completed his training with Klaus Huber in Freiburg. Between 1986 and 1988, he was a resident at the Cité des Arts in Paris and took part in the computer music course at IRCAM. He resided at the Villa Médicis in Rome during 1988/89 and then joined the Istituto Svizzero di Roma in 1989/90. Having also studied visual arts, the composer’s oeuvre is strongly influenced by both the music of Edgar Varese and the art of Alberto Giacometti. Also characteristic of his work is the connection between compositional creativity and visual thinking : his Assonances, which he has been working on since 1983, are presented like a sketchbook. In turn, his first major work for electronics, Congruences (1989), was inspired by spatial-geometric terms such as level, perspective, anamorphosis and figure, which he transferred into musical entities of time.

Some aspects of Jarrell’s oeuvre - such as the lucidity of elaborated sound textures, a certain purism in reprocessing material, the ingenuity of his harmonics - indicate a sound close to that of French composers. Recent compositions include La Chambre aux échos, which Michael Jarrell composed for the ensemble intercontemporain on the occasion of Pierre Boulez’ 85th Birthday in 2010, and ...Ombres... (2011) for orchestra. 2012 saw the premieres of his cello concerto Émergences (Nachlese VI) in Salt Lake City and Lyon, dedicated to Jean-Guihen Queyras, and the song cycle Nachlese Vb in Geneva and New York. In 2013, the world premiere of his monodrama Siegfried, nocturne (for male voice and ensemble) followed at the Wagner Geneva Festival and in January 2014, that of his piano concerto Reflets with Nicolas Hodges at the KlangZeit Festival in Münster.

Stage works have also become particularly important for Michael Jarrell : in 1994, he composed the monodrama Cassandre, in which he combines electronics with conventional timbres, and in 2006 the opera Galileo, based on the play by Bertolt Brecht. In 2010, his music theatre work Le père after Heiner Muller was first performed at the Schwetzingen Festival. At the start of the current season, the Arditti Quartet and Bamberger Symphoniker under Jonathan Nott gave the world premiere of his new concerto Spuren for string quartet and orchestra at the Festival Musica a Strasbourg. This work can also be heard in April 2015 in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, and in Lucerne with the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra. Michael Jarrell is currently working on a new viola concerto for Tabea Zimmermann.

Michael Jarrell has received numerous awards including the Prix Acanthes (1983), the Beethoven Prize of the city of Bonn (1986), the Prix Marescotti (1986) and the Siemens-Forderpreis (1990). In 2004 he was appointed Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in Switzerland. He has been Professor of Composition at the University of Vienna since 1993 and at the Geneva Conservatory since 2004.

Hanspeter Kyburz was born in Lagos, Nigeria. He studied composition in Graz, with A. Dobrowolsky and Gösta Neuwirth, and later, starting in 1982, at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. He also studied musicology, the history of art, and philosophy. Some years later he was awarded a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. He was awarded the Boris Blacher Prize (1990) and the Schneider-Schott Prize (1994), was a laureate of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin (1996), and won the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Prize (2000). Since 1997 he has been Professor of Composition at the Hochschule für Musik ‘Hanns Eisler’ in Berlin. He has also taught in Darmstadt in 1998, at the Musikhochschule in Basle (2000-2002), and at the Acanthes Festival in Metz in 2010. He has composed works for festivals and concert series in Germany and abroad, including Berlin (Ultraschall), Brussels (Ars Musica), Cologne (Musik der Zeit), Donaueschingen, Frankfurt am Main, Graz (Steirischer Herbst), London, Lucerne, New York, Paris, Stuttgart (ECLAT), Vienna (Wien modern), Witten (Tage für neue Kammermusik), and Zurich (Tage für neue Musik).

Frederik van Rossum was born in Brussels. Since he was awarded the Premier Grand Prix de Rome in 1965, his works have won many international awards. His Réquisitoire for brass and percussion, for example, won First Prize at the International Rostrum of Composers backed by UNESCO in Paris in 1981. His First Violin Concerto was the compulsory work at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 1980 and was subsequently the subject of five different recordings. In 1988 his Aria a modo di vocalizzo was the compulsory work for the semi-final of the Queen Elisabeth Competition for Singing. A brilliant orchestrator, van Rossum has written a number of works for orchestra with and without soloists. He has also composed chamber music and music for the stage and for opera, along with an extensive and varied range of works for the piano ; he is himself an excellent pianist and his works for the instrument occupy a central place in his oeuvre. Frederik van Rossum is a member of the Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. From 1995 to 2000 he was Composer in Residence of the Festival of Flanders.