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.

The international career of Augustin Dumay began in 1980 when Herbert von Karajan invited him to perform as a soloist with the Berliner Philharmoniker. Since then, he has regularly performed with the Berliner Philharmoniker, the BRSO, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, the London Symphony, the Philharmonia, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, conducted by I. Fischer, D. Harding, R. Ticciati, C. Dutoit, D. Zinman, S. Ozawa, Y. Temirkanov. He has been the music director of the Kansai Philharmonic Orchestra in Osaka (Japan) since 2011 and is master in residence at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel. His discography includes more than forty CDs for Warner, Deutsche Grammophon and Onyx, which have won many international awards. His recording of the Beethoven sonatas with Maria João Pires is regarded by critics as a major achievement. His forthcoming recordings will be of Johann Sebastian Bach’s sonatas and partitas, and of concerti by Berg, Bartok and Stravinsky with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. Augustin Dumay plays a Guarnerius del Gesù from 1743 (ex-Kogan).

Miriam Fried has played with virtually every major orchestra in the United States and Europe. In recent seasons she has appeared with such leading ensembles as the Boston Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Orchestre de Paris and the Czech Philharmonic. In 1993 she premiered a violin concerto written for her by Donald Erb with the Grand Rapids Symphony. She actively maintains chamber music as an important part of her musical life. She was first violin of the Mendelssohn String Quartet for ten years and collaborates regularly with her son, pianist Jonathan Biss. A renowned educator, Miriam Fried is on the faculty of the New England Conservatory and gives masterclasses around the world. She was artistic director of the Ravinia Steans Music Institute from 1993 to 2023. Miriam Fried plays a particularly remarkable violin, a 1718 Stradivarius said to have been the favourite instrument of its eighteenth-century owner, composer and conductor Louis Spohr.

After graduating from the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles at the age of 17, Lorenzo Gatto went on to study under Augustin Dumay at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel and under Boris Kuschnir at the Vienna Conservatoire. His hard work and determination were rewarded when he won both the Second Prize and the Audience Award at the 2009 Queen Elisabeth Competition. His nomination as a ‘Rising Star’ in 2010 enabled him to make his recital debuts on Europe’s leading stages. In chamber music, he has shared the stage with Maria João Pires, Menahem Pressler, Jean-Claude Vanden Eynden and Frank Braley, among others. His numerous recordings have won several awards, including a Diapason d’Or for his recording of the complete Beethoven sonatas with pianist Julien Libeer. Since 2018, Lorenzo Gatto has been a guest professor at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel. A committed and curious musician, he created his own string ensemble, Karavan Vivaldi, with which he revisits pieces by composers from the repertoire and stages his own compositions to breathe new life into classical music.

After graduating from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris, Philippe Graffin continued his studies under Josef Gingold in the United States as well as under Philippe Hirschhorn and Miriam Fried. He was a laureate of the Fritz Kreisler Competition in Austria, where he was noticed by Yehudi Menuhin, who invited him to record his first CD under his direction in London. His particularly rich discography has been hailed by critics internationally ; it includes some forty recordings, of which more than thirty concertos. Several composers have written works specially for him, including Rodion Shchedrin, Vytautas Barkauskas, Philippe Hersant, David Matthews, Yves Prin, Peter Fribbins and Nicola Campogrande. Philippe Graffin is the founder of the Consonances festival in Saint- Nazaire, which he directed for a quarter century, and more recently of the Ysaÿe’s Knokke festival. In 2018 he also founded the Traces festival in Brussels, which aims to bring to life works by composers who disappeared during the Holocaust. He teaches at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris and the Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel.

Koichiro Harada studied the violin, chamber music, and orchestral conducting at the Toho Gakuen School of Music in Tokyo and at the Juilliard School under Hideo Saito, Kazuyoshi Akiyama, Dorothy DeLay, and Ivan Galamian. In 1969, he founded the Tokyo String Quartet, of which he was first violin for twelve years. He later taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music and at the Aspen Music Festival. In 1983, Koichiro Harada returned to Tokyo and founded a number of other chamber music ensembles, including NADA and the Mito Quartet. He has also become a well-known orchestral conductor and works regularly with ensembles such as the New Japan Philharmonic, the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra, the Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra, the Sapporo Symphony Orchestra, the Kyoto Symphony Orchestra, and the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. In parallel with his concert activities, Koichiro Harada teaches at the Toho Gakuen School of Music in Tokyo and serves regularly on the juries of a number of international competitions, including the Queen Elisabeth Competition and the Wieniawski and Paganini competitions. In 2005, he chaired the jury of the Long-Thibaud-Crespin Competition in Paris.

Acclaimed by specialist critics, Dong-Suk Kang’s fluid technique and perfect bowing have established him as one of the greatest violinists of our time. He has played with the most prestigious orchestras worldwide, under renowned conductors such as Charles Dutoit, Seiji Ozawa, Kurt Masur, Paavo Järvi, Yehudi Menuhin, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Myung-Whun Chung, Leonard Slatkin, Rudolf Barshai, Mariss Jansons, Roger Norrington, Paavo Berglund, and Evgeny Svetlanov. His recordings have received glowing reviews and have won the Grand Prix du Disque de l’Académie Charles Cros and the Grand Prix de la Nouvelle Académie du Disque. They have also been nominated for the Gramophone Award. Dong-Suk Kang teaches at Yonsei University. He is the artistic director of the Seoul Spring Festival and MusicAlp festival in France. He is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France.

The composer Victor Kissine studied and obtained his doctorate at the St Petersburg Conservatoire. He has lived in Belgium since 1990. His catalogue includes symphonic and concertante works (including three violin concertos), chamber music, choral and vocal works, two operas and ballets, as well as film music. His international career has been marked by premieres at New York City’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, the Berlin, Munich and Hamburg philharmonic orchestras, the Salzburg and Lockenhaus festivals, as well as collaborations with the San Francisco Symphony, Berlin’s Konzerthaus and Komische Oper, and the Belgian National Orchestra. For many years he has worked closely with Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica. He composed the imposed piece Caprice for the semi-final of the 2012 violin session of the Queen Elisabeth Competition. In 2008 Victor Kissine was elected to the Royal Academy of Belgium.

Kyung Sun Lee studied at Seoul National University, the Peabody Conservatory and the Juilliard School, under Sylvia Rosenberg, Robert Mann and Dorothy Delay. She has won many prizes, among others at the Concours de Montréal in 1991, the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 1993 and the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1994. After a period as assistant professor at the Oberlin Conservatory in 2001 and associate professor at the University of Houston in 2006, she was a professor at Seoul National University from 2009 to 2022 and also taught for two summers at the Aspen Music Festival. Kyung Sun Lee has been invited to perform at the chamber music festivals of Seattle and Marlboro and was a member of the KumHo/Asiana String Quartet. In recent years, she has been invited to serve as a jury member at the Tibor Junior Competition in Switzerland, the Singapore Competition and the Joseph Joachim Competition in Hanover. She is also the artistic director of the Changwon International Chamber Music Festival and the Seoul Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra. In 2023 Kyung Sun Lee was appointed Dorothy Richard Starling Chair in Violin Studies at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

Grammy-award winning Midori is a visionary artist, activist and educator. She is celebrated worldwide as one of the most outstanding violinists of our time. Midori appears with the world’s leading orchestras, including the London, Chicago, and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras; the Sinfonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks; the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics; the Mahler Chamber Orchestra; and Festival Strings Lucerne. She has collaborated with such outstanding musicians as Claudio Abbado, Emanuel Ax, Leonard Bernstein, Constantinos Carydis, Christoph Eschenbach, Paavo Järvi, Mariss Jansons, Yo-Yo Ma, Susanna Mälkki and Zubin Mehta. Deeply committed to furthering humanitarian and educational goals, Midori has founded several non-profit organizations: Midori & Friends, Partners in Performance, the Orchestra Residencies Program and Music Sharing. She was appointed a Messenger of Peace by the Secretary-General of the United Nations in 2007. Midori is the Dorothy Richard Starling Chair in Violin Studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and is a distinguished visiting artist at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. She is the newly appointed Artistic Director of Ravinia Steans Music Institute’s Piano & Strings program.

Vadim Repin gave his first major recital in St Petersburg at the age of 11. At the age of 14, he made his debuts in Tokyo, Munich, Berlin, Helsinki and, at 15, at Carnegie Hall in New York City. At the age of 17 he was the youngest violinist to win the Queen Elisabeth Competition, which had a considerable impact on his career. France has made him a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Career highlights include tours with the London Symphony Orchestra and Valery Gergiev (with whom he gave the first performance of James MacMillan’s Violin Concerto dedicated to him), the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and Zubin Mehta, and the Vienna Philharmonic and Riccardo Muti. He founded the Trans-Siberian Art Festival in 2014 and, as artistic director, has commissioned works by Lera Auerbach, Sofia Gubaidulina, Arvo Pärt and Mark-Anthony Turnage. Closely involved in music education, he has given masterclasses at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and is an honorary professor at the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.

Born into a family of musicians, Tatiana Samouil began playing the violin at the age of 6. She went on to study at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow under Maya Glezarova and at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in Brussels under Igor Oistrakh. She is a laureate of the Queen Elisabeth, Tchaikovsky, Michael Hill and Jean Sibelius competitions. She has performed with such leading orchestras as the Russian National Orchestra, the St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, the Deutsches Kammerorchester, the Orchestre de Chambre de Toulouse and the Orchestra of Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, and under such renowned conductors as Antonio Pappano, Christian Arming, Kazushi Ono, Dmitry Liss, Gilbert Varga and Jean-Jacques Kantorow. Tatiana Samouil has made more than twenty recordings, winning a Diapason d’Or and a Choc de Classica. She recently released the complete chamber music of Rachmaninov with pianist Andrei Korobeinikov and cellist Pavel Gomziakov, as well as a tribute album to Maria Malibran with her sister Anna Samouil and the Orchestre Royal de Chambre de Wallonie. A passionate educator, she teaches at the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles and at the Musikene Higher School of Music in San Sebastián.

Vineta Sareika began her violin studies at the age of 5 in her home town of Jurmala in Latvia. She studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris under Gérard Poulet and at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel under Augustin Dumay. A laureate of the 2009 Queen Elisabeth Competition, Vineta Sareika embarked on a multifaceted career covering a wide range of activities. She performs regularly as a soloist with Europe’s leading orchestras, has been concertmaster of the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra and, since 2012, first violin of the Artemis Quartett. Her recordings with the Artemis Quartett, as well as with the Dali Piano Trio and her long-standing performing partner, pianist Amandine Savary, have been widely acclaimed by critics (Echo Klassik, Diapason d’Or, Choc de l’année by Classica, Editor’s Choice by Gramophone). In 2023 Vineta Sareika was appointed concertmaster of the Berliner Philharmoniker. In addition to her concert activities, she teaches chamber music at the Universität der Künste in Berlin and conducts masterclasses.

Violinist, conductor, composer, performer, transcriber and presenter, Dmitry Sitkovetsky is renowned the world over for his versatility. His interests cover all aspects of musical life and he is regarded as a renowned teacher with a strong personality. In the four decades since he began his career at the Vienna Musikverein in 1979, Dmitry Sitkovetsky has forged close relationships and worked with such great conductors as Sir Neville Marriner, Mariss Jansons, Yuri Temirkanov and Sir Colin Davis and with such orchestras as the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest of Amsterdam and the London Symphony Orchestra. His career as a violinist is also reflected in an extensive discography of more than forty recordings. Dmitry Sitkovetsky’s commitment to the younger generations of musicians has led him to sit on the jury of many international competitions, among which the George Enescu Competition in Bucharest, the Concertino Praga, the Fritz Kreisler Competition in Vienna, the Michael Hill Competition in New Zealand and the Montréal and Indianapolis competitions.

Isabelle Van Keulen is one of the rare musicians to have established herself as both a violinist and violist on the greatest concert stages. As a soloist, Isabelle van Keulen collaborates regularly with major orchestras around the world under the direction of leading conductors. For three years she was artistic director of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. As both director and soloist with the orchestra, she undertook extensive concert tours in addition to performances in Oslo. Since 2017 she has been the artistic director of the Deutsche Kammerakademie Neuss am Rhein. Chamber music is another focus of her artistic work. As artistic director, she had a major impact on the Delft Chamber Music Festival between 1997 and 2006. Performances of contemporary works are also important to her: her repertoire includes many works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and she has recorded the Violin Concerto dedicated to her by Erkki-Sven Tüür. Isabelle van Keulen teaches violin, viola and chamber music at the Lucerne School of Music.