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.

Julian Anderson (London) studied composition with John Lambert, Alexander Goehr and Tristan Murail. His first acknowledged work, Diptych (1990) for orchestra, won the 1992 Royal Philharmonic Society Prize for Young Composers and was subsequently nominated as the BBC entry in the 1996 International Rostrum of Composers in Paris. His two commissions for the London Sinfonietta, Khorovod (1994) and Alhambra Fantasy (2000), have been widely performed by leading ensembles across Europe and the USA. His other most played works include the orchestral BBC Proms commission The Stations of the Sun (1998) which has been performed by both the Boston Symphony and Cleveland Orchestras, and the chamber work Poetry Nearing Silence (1997) a commission from the Nash Ensemble.

From 1996 to 2001 he was Composer in Residence with the chamber orchestra Sinfonia 21. Between 2000-2005 he was Composer in Association with the CBSO, and he completed three orchestral works for them: Imagin’d Corners (2002) a piece for five horns and orchestra, Symphony, which was winner of the British Composer Award (2004), and Eden, written for the opening concert of the Cheltenham Festival 2005. He also wrote Book of Hours (2005), a piece for ensemble and electronics for the BCMG, and Four American Choruses for the CBSO Chorus. More recently, the 2006 BBC Proms featured commissioned work Heaven is Shy of Earth for mezzo-soprano chorus and orchestra starring Angelika Kirschlager and a newly commissioned work by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Alleluia, was premiered on the prestigious re-opening of the Southbank Centre’s main venue the Royal Festival Hall in June 2007.

In October 2002 Anderson was appointed Artistic Director of the Philharmonia Orchestra’s ‘Music of Today’ series. Throughout the 2002/3 season he was ‘Composer in Focus’ with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, a relationship which blossomed again when be became their Composer in Residence for 2010. He was the Cleveland Orchestra’s Daniel Lewis Young Composer Fellow between 2005 and 2007. A ballet based on Darwin’s Origin of the Species, choreographed by Mark Baldwin was premiered in September 2009; The Comedy of Change (2009) is a joint commission from Rambert Dance and the Asko Ensemble.

Anderson was Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music from 1996 and was Head of Composition there from 1999 to 2004. From 2004 to 2007 he was Fanny Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University. He returned to the UK permanently in September 2007 to work as a freelance composer and take up a newly devised post at the Guildhall School of Professor of Composition and Composer in Residence.

Two recent recordings with NMC and Ondine were nominated for the Gramophone Awards. 'Alhambra Fantasy', the Ondine disc of orchestral and ensemble works won the Contemporary Classical Award at the 2007 Classic FM Gramophone Awards.

Toshio Hosokawa was born in Hiroshima in 1955. He studied composition under Isang Yun at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin and under Klaus Huber at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg. In 1980, he took part for the first time in the Internationale Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik in Darmstadt. Since then, he has been commissioned to compose works for the leading orchestras, festivals, and opera houses of Europe, America, and Asia.

Many of his works have been premiered by eminent conductors such as Kazushi Ono, Jun Märkl, Kent Nagano, Sir Simon Rattle, and Robin Ticciati. Those works include Hanjo, his second opera, commissioned by the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2004, the orchestral work Circulating Ocean, premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival in 2005, and Woven Dreams, an orchestral work composed for the Lucerne Festival and Carnegie Hall, for which he received the International British Composer Award in 2013. In 2011, two further major works by Toshio Hosokawa were given their premieres : his third opera, Matsukaze, at La Monnaie/De Munt and his horn concerto, Moment of Blossoming, performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker. Several of his works were performed at the 2013 Salzburg Festival, including two premieres : Klage for soprano and orchestra and Ancient Voices for wind quintet. In 2014, he won the Otaka Prize for the third time, for his trumpet concerto Im Nebel.

In recent works, Toshio Hosokawa has sought to describe the relations between nature and humanity in works that he has presented as prayers or requiems. A number of works were premiered in the course of 2014, including Aeolus, Fluss, and Drei Engel-Lieder. In 2015, Nach dem Sturm, for two sopranos and orchestra, was commissioned for the 50th birthday of the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. In 2016, his latest opera, Stilles Meer (original text and direction by Oriza Hirata), describing the city of Fukushima some years after the earthquake that struck eastern Japan in 2011, was a big success with the public.

In 2001, Toshio Hosokawa was made a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. He was composer in residence with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra from 1998 to 2007, with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester in 2006-2007, with the WDR Rundfunkchor in 2006-2008, and with the Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest in 2013-2014. In 2012, he was elected a member of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Kunste in Munich ; that same year, he was awarded the Medal of Honour with Purple Ribbon by the Government of Japan.

He is currently Music Director of the Takefu International Music Festival and Guest Professor at Tokyo College of Music and at Elisabeth University of Music in Hiroshima.

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).

For many years now, the composer Claude Ledoux has explored the idea of ‘musical crossings’ as he attempts to reflect our fragmented world in his work. As a result, his oeuvre has been marked, not only by the interaction between composed music - which he studied with the likes of Pousseur, Rzewski, Ligeti, and Xenakis - and folk music, but also by the interaction of non-European music, which he has been attracted by since his teenage years, with new technology - reflecting his research in the Liège studios and in those of the Ircam in Paris. His recent works, accordingly, demonstrate this interest in the kind of ‘cultural porosity’ in which emotion arises from geographical encounters and connections between different historical periods, linking spirituality to the most obvious aspects of our material existence.

Fascinated by world music, Ledoux has travelled widely, particularly in the East, where he has made many trips to Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and northern India ; these have fed in to his work. As a composer, he has received a number of awards, including a fellowship from the New York - based Civitella Ranieri Foundation. His compositions are performed frequently on every continent. In 2009, he composed the compulsory work for the semi-final of the Queen Elisabeth Competition. In 2012, he served as artistic director and composer in residence of the Ars Musica Festival. He has written a number of works with an Eastern dimension over recent years : Crossing Edges for erhu and orchestra, Echoes of Crossing Edges for the Shanghai Sinfonietta, and Euridice effacée, commissioned by the Muromachi Ensemble (Tokyo). In addition to composing instrumental works, 2016 sees him continue this journey, with new pieces for orchestra and instrumental soloist on Far Eastern themes as well as an epic vocal and instrumental work that will be premiered in Japan in the context of the 150th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Japan and Belgium.

Artistic Director (and a founding member) of the Ensemble LAPS, a relatively new ensemble that combines laptops with acoustic instruments, Ledoux has also written numerous articles on composition. He is Professor of Theoretical and Applied Analysis at the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMDP) and of Composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Mons / Arts2 and has also taught these subjects at seminars in the Universities of Campinas and of São Paulo (Brazil) and at the Shanghai Conservatory (China). He has been a member of the Académie Royale de Belgique since 2005.

Tristan Murail was born in 1947. He is a composer and plays the Martenot waves. He graduated in economics and also has a degree in classical Arabic. He studied composition under Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory (CNSM) from 1967 to 1971. He became a boarder at the Villa Medici from 1971 to 1973, where his encounter with Giacinto Scelsi made a lasting impression on him. In 1973, he collaborated to set up the ensemble L’Itinéraire, a group of composers and performers who sought to develop new relations between instruments and electronic means. He has also worked, both at the Ircam and independently, on a computer-assisted system of composition. From 1991 to 1997, Tristan Murail taught composition at the Paris Conservatory and at the Ircam, while also taking part in international conferences and seminars. He currently lives in New York, where he has been given a chair of composition at Columbia University. Tristan Murail’s music is based on physical properties, on the acoustics of sounds themselves, rather than on abstract or artificial theories. This composer’s catalogue encompasses works for orchestra, for small ensembles and soloists, as well as chamber music.

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.