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.

Rafaël D’Haene was born in Gullegem, Belgium, in 1943 and studied the piano (E. de Pueyo), harmony (J. Louël), counterpoint (V. Legley) and fugue (M. Quinet) from 1962 to 1967 at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels. He earned his “Licence de Composition” in 1968 from the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris under H. Dutilleux. He subsequently studied composition for three years in the class of Victor Legley at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel, where he received his final diploma in composition in 1971.

Rafaël D’Haene has taught harmony at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels since 1970, and subsequently also counterpoint, fugue and composition. In addition, he has taught music analysis at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel since 1985 and composition from 1986 to 2003.

As a composer, Rafaël D’Haene has been the recipient of numerous awards both in Belgium and abroad. Following prizes in the composition competition of the Province of West Flanders (1969) and the Tenuto competition (1972, for his orchestral work Capriccio), he earned the first prize at the international composition competition in Alicante with his cantata Klage der Ariadne (1972). In 1977 he won the Lili Boulanger prize in Paris for his complete oeuvre. In 1980 and 1981 there followed the Eugène Baie Prize (Antwerp) and the Koopal Prize (for orchestral music). Finally, he was awarded the Darche Brothers Prize, given by the Patrimony of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels in 1985 for his complete work, and the SABAM Prize for Serious Music in 1989. In 2002 and 2004 he won La Bourse de Perfectionnement Emile Bernheim of the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel.

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.

Betsy Jolas, born in Paris in 1926, is the daughter of translator Maria Jolas and poet and journalist Eugène Jolas, founder of the well known literary magazine transition, in which the Finnegans Wake of James Joyce was published under the heading "work in progress". She went to the U.S. in 1940, completed her general schooling, then started studying composition with Paul Boepple, piano with Helen Schnabel and organ with Carl Weinrich.

After graduating from Bennington College, Betsy Jolas returned to Paris in 1946 to continue her studies with Darius Milhaud, Simone Plé-Caussade and Olivier Messiaen at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique of Paris.

Prize winner of the International Conducting Competition of Besançon (1953), she has since won many awards, including Copley Foundation of Chicago (1954), ORTF (1961), American Academy of Arts (1973), Koussevitsky Fondation (1974), Grand Prix National de la Musique (1974), Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris (1981), Grand Prix de la SACEM (1982). Betsy Jolas became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983.

In 1985 she was promoted to Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. In 1992 she received the Maurice Ravel Prix International and was named "Personality of the Year" for France. In 1994 she was awarded the Prix SACEM for the best première performance of the year for her work Frauenleben. She was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995 and made Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 1997. From 1971 to 1974 Betsy Jolas replaced Olivier Messiaen at his course at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique of Paris and was appointed to the faculty in 1975.

She has also taught at Tanglewood, Yale, Harvard, Mills College (Darius Milhaud chair), Berkeley, USC and San Diego University, to name a few. Her works, written for a great variety of combinations, have been widely performed throughout the world by first class artists such as Elisabeth Chojnacka, Kent Nagano, William Christie, Claude Helffer, Kim Kashkashian... and by leading groups : The Boston Symphony Chamber Players, the) Concord Quartet, the Domaine Musical, the Percussions de Strasbourg, the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, the London Sinfonietta, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Philharmonia, etc. Twelve of her works have been recorded for EMI, Adès, CRI, Erato, Barclay, several of which have been the recipients of grand prize gramophone awards.

Vaclav Kucera studied composition at Moscow Conservatory with Vissarion Shebalin and simultaneously graduated from musicological studies. He has worked for the Czechoslovak Radio, headed the Cabinet of Contemporary Musical Studies affiliated to the Union of Czecho slovak Composers and was scientifically active at the Institute of Musical Science in the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. From 1969 to 1983, he he has been secretary-general of the Union of Czech Composers and Concert Artists. In recognition of his work, he was awarded the state distinction For Outstanding Work in 1979 and the honorary title of Merited Artist in 1986.

During his early creative period when his idiom was basically tonal and his starting-points issuing from folklore with a tendency towards monumentalization, Vaclav Kucera composed The Distant Home, a sonata for violin and piano, the dance drama Brigands Fire, the ballet Festival Fairy-tale, and the cycle Songs of the Earth. His symphony for large orchestra of the beginning of the sixties represents a turning point after which Dramas for 9 Instruments, and the stereophonic concerti no The Pied Piper, stand for a movement towards new stylish certainties. In the seventies, his style, imbued with modern compositional technology not only in the instrumental and vocal areas, but also in the sphere of electronic music, is turning to new emotionality. This is especially evident in his works of the seventies, including besides others the cycles Diario, Orbis pictus and The Spring Manifesto, or the vast musical-dramatic fresco Lidice. An important part in the forming of his present performance is impersonated by his vocal cycles of the latest years, especially Bitter and Other Songs on the verses of Josef Kainar.

The compositions of Vaclav Kucera have won a number of distinctions : The Tableau for Piano and Orchestra the prize of Queen Maria-Jose in Geneva (1970), Lidice, a special recognition of the Czechoslovak Radio for the 25th anniversary of Czechoslovakia s liberation (1970), as well as the prize of the Italian Radio Prix d'Italia (1972), the cycle The Celebration of Spring the first prize in the competition of the Central Council of the Trades-Unions (1977), the string quartet the Consciousness of Continuities the prize of the Union of Czechoslovak Composers and Concert Artists (1983).

He is known for his very vast theoretical, musicological and publishing activities. He is among others the author of M. P. Mussorgsky - Music of Life, Talent, Mastery, World Outlook, New Trends in Soviet Music, a number of scientific studies, radio and TV musical-educational programmes as well as popularization lectures.

He has been a teacher of the department of composition at the Prague Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts.

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.

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.