Chairman of the jury
Arie Van Lysebeth
Belgium, °1938
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.
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Unsuk Chin
Korea
Unsuk Chin was born in Seoul, studied with Ligeti in Hamburg, and is now resident in Berlin. She is a winner of the 2004 Grawemeyer Award for her Violin Concerto and the 2005 Arnold Schoenberg prize. Her output features both electronic and acoustic scores, modern in language, but lyrical and non-doctrinaire in communicative power. She has an acute ear for instrumentation, orchestral colour, and rhythmic imagery. Her works are performed worldwide by major orchestras, contemporary music ensembles and interpreters. She is championed by conductors Kent Nagano, Simon Rattle, Peter Eötvös, David Robertson, Myung-Whun Chung and George Benjamin, and violinists Christian Tetzlaff and Viviane Hagner. The Bavarian State Opera, Berlin Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and China Philharmonic have performed her works. Furthermore, she has been programmed by contemporary music ensembles such as Ensemble Intercontemporain, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Modern and Kronos Quartet. Her music is recorded by Deutsche Grammophon and she publishes exclusively with Boosey&Hawkes. Composer-in-residence with Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, she is also Artistic Director of its Contemporary Music Series since 2006.
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Michael Jarrell
Switzerland, °1958
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.
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Bruno Mantovani
France, °1974
After receiving five first prizes from the Paris Conservatory (analysis, aesthetics, orchestration, composition, music history) and attending the computer music Cursus at Ircam, Bruno Mantovani (1974) began an international career. His works have been performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Philharmonie in Cologne, the KKL in Lucerne, La Scala in Milan, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Centre in New York, the Cité de la musique and the Salle Pleyel in Paris.

Faithful to his preferred performers, he collaborates with prestigious soloists (Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Alain Billard, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Antoine Tamestit, Tabea Zimmermann), conductors (Pierre Boulez, Sir Andrew Davis, Peter Eötvös, Laurence Equilbey, Gunter Herbig, Emmanuel Krivine, Susanna Mälkki, Jonathan Nott, Pascal Rophé François-Xavier Roth), ensembles (Accentus, Intercontemporain, TM+) and orchestras (Bamberg Symphony, BBC Cardiff, Chicago Symphony, WDR Cologne, La Chambre Philharmonique, Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, Liège Philharmonic, BBC London, Lucerne Academy, Orchestre de Paris, Paris Opera Orchestra, Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France, Sarrebrücken Radio Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, NHK Tokyo, RAI Turin, Sinfonia Varsovia, RSO Vienna).

He has received distinctions from international competitions (Stuttgart in 1999, Unesco Composer Tribune in 2001), the Hervé Dugardin and Georges Enesco prizes as well as the "Grand Prix" from the Sacem in 2000, 2005 and 2009, the André Caplet and Institute Prizes in 2005, the new talent prize from the SACD in 2007, the Belmont prize from the Forberg-Schneider Foundation that same year, a "Victoire de la Musique" for composer of the year in 2009, the Claudio Abbado prize from the Berlin Philharmonic and the international music press prize in 2010, as well as numerous awards for his recordings (including several "coups de Coeur" from the Charles Cros Academy, a "Choc de l'année" from the Monde de la musique, and chosen as one of the best recordings of 2008 from the New York Times). He became "Chevalier des Arts et Lettres" in January 2010. He was in residency at the Herrenhaus at Edenkoben in 1999, at the October in Normandy festival in 2001, at Bologna as part of the "Villa Médicis hors les murs" program sponsored by AFAA in 2002, at the French Academy of Rome (Villa Médicis) in 2004 and 2005, at the Besançon festival between 2006 and 2008, and with the National Orchestra of Lille between 2008 and 2011. The Musica festival, where he has been special guest artist since 2001, dedicated a portrait to him in 2006.

Starting in 2010 he began an extended collaboration with the Paris Opera (premier of the ballet Siddharta during the first season, and an opera based on the life of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in March 2011). Inspired by the relationships linking music with other forms of artistic expression, he has collaborated with novelists Hubert Nyssen and Eric Reinhardt, librettists Christophe Ghristi and François Regnault, chef Ferran Adrià, choreographers Jean-Christophe Maillot and Angelin Preljocaj, and film maker Pierre Coulibeuf. His work is often a reflection on the history of Western classical music (Bach, Gesualdo, Rameau, Schubert, Schumann) or popular forms (jazz, Eastern music).

Bruno Mantovani is also a conductor, and regularly conducts contemporary music ensembles (Accentus, Alternance, Cepheus, Intercontemporain, Sospeso, TM+) as well as the National Orchestra of Lille.

He is the headmaster of the Paris Conservatory since September 2010. His works are published by Editions Henry Lemoine.
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Peter Swinnen
Belgium, °1965
Peter Swinnen studied at the Royal Brussels Conservatory and the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel, before obtaining a doctorate in the Arts at the vub in Brussels. Starting in 1990, he taught the cello and musical analysis at several music schools and went on to teach musical technology and composition at the Royal Brussels Conservatory, of which he has been director since 2008. He collaborates with a number of ensembles on live performances of electronic music in contemporary works. His compositions include chamber music for various (sometimes electronic) instruments, solo works, lieder, symphonic poems for large orchestra, symphonies, concertos, cantatas, ballets, and music for films and the theatre, some of which has been recorded for radio, television, and CD. His works have been premiered at the Flanders Festival, Ars Musica, Wien Modern, the International Frederyk Chopin Festival, the World Carillon Congress, etc. He has received numerous awards, including the CERA Prize - Jeugd en Muziek Vlaanderen in 1991 for his entire body of work and the Composition Prize of the Province of Antwerp for his opera The Petrifying Blue in 1992. He has twice won the prize for a Belgian composition to be played as a compulsory work in the semi-final of the Queen Elisabeth Competition : with Canzone in 1997 and with Ciaccona in 2001. In 2005 he became a laureate of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts.
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Frederik van Rossum
Belgium, °1939
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.
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