Dr. Eleonore Büning, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1952, studied musicology, literature and performing arts in Berlin. After writing freelance as author and moderator for various papers and radio stations, she was from 1993 to 1997 in Hamburg responsible music editor for Die Zeit and has worked since 1997 in the same function for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) in Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. Dr. Büning’s published books include Wie Beethoven auf den Sockel kam (1989), Streifzüge durch die Klassik mit Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (2005). Various lectures about musicology & music criticism were given at universities in Hamburg, Heidelberg, Dortmund, etc. Dr. Büning has won various prizes, including Joseph-Roth-Preis (Klagenfurt) and Heidelberger Musikpreis. Besides this, Eleonore Büning joined as member of the jury in diverse musical competitions, such as Bechstein-Preis (Essen), Klavierolymp (Bad Kissingen), Beethovenpreis (Bonn) and Deutscher Pianistenpreis (Frankfurt). Since 1998 she has worked continuously for Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik (German Record Prize) in various jury categories, piano music, concert and chamber music. Since 2010 she has been chairman of the board for this prize. Since 2015 she has been member of the adviser board of Deutscher Musikwettbewerb.

From an early age, the Ukrainian-born pianist Anna Fedorova showed an innate musical maturity and amazing technical abilities. She regularly performs at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, New York’s Carnegie Hall & Lincoln Center, Tonhalle Zürich, Théâtre des Champs- Elysées in Paris, Palau de la Musica in Barcelona, Auditorio Nacional in Madrid and London’s Barbican Centre & Royal Albert Hall. She has so far released four solo piano albums, five chamber music albums, and all of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concertos with the Sinfonieorchester St. Gallen under Modestas Pitrenas, exclusively on Channel Classics Records. Her highly acclaimed live recording of Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto has over 45 million views on YouTube. Anna’s recent highlights include performance at the Opening of Verbier festival with the Verbier Festival Orchestra under the baton of Gianandrea Noseda, performances with the Hong Kong Philharmonic under the batons of Daniel Harding and Vasiliy Petrenko as well as a recital at the international piano festival La Roque d’Anthéron and a European and USA tour with the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, including thirteen performances at the BBC Proms, Edinburgh Festival, Lincoln Center, Elbphilharmonie, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam and more. The New York Times noted that “pianist Anna Fedorova was a sensitive, poetic soloist in Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Anna is a co-founder and director of the Davidsbündler Music Academy in The Hague. Anna Fedorova graduated from the Lysenko School of Music in Kyiv with Borys Fedorov and the Accademia Pianistica in Imola, Italy, with Leonid Margarius. She received her Master’s degree and Artist Diploma at the Royal College of Music, London, under the guidance of Norma Fisher. Her mentors include Alfred Brendel, Menahem Pressler, Steven Isserlis, and Sir András Schiff.

annafedorova.com

Born in Pisa in 1973, Francesco Filidei graduated from the Conservatory of Florence and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris, earning top marks in both institutions. As an organist and composer, he has been invited by the most important contemporary music festivals and performed by orchestras such as the WDR, SWR, RSO Wien, ORT, RAI, Tokyo Philharmonic, Bayerischer Rundfunk, La Verdi, and the Philharmonic Orchestras of Warsaw and Vilnius, as well as by specialized ensembles including Linea, L’Itinéraire, Alter Ego, NEM, EOC, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, Klangforum Wien, Musikfabrik, Recherche, Tokyo Sinfonietta, Icarus, Ictus, London Sinfonietta, and Neue Vocalsolisten. His works have been performed in particular at the Berlin, Cologne, and Paris Philharmonies; at Suntory Hall and the Tokyo Opera House; at the Theaterhaus in Vienna; the Herkulessaal in Munich; the Tonhalle in Zurich; and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. After receiving a commission from the IRCAM Comité de Lecture in 2005, he was awarded the Salzburg Music Förderpreis in 2006, the Takefu Prize in 2007, the Siemens Förderpreis in 2009, the UNESCO Picasso/Miró Medal at the Rostrum of Composers in 2011, the Abbiati Prize in 2015, and the Charles Cros Academy Award in 2016. He was a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2005, a member of the Casa de Velázquez in 2006 and 2007, a resident at the Villa Medici in 2012, and a DAAD fellow as well as composer-in-residence with Ensemble 2e2m in 2015. He has taught composition at Royaumont (Voix Nouvelles), the University of Iowa, Takefu, the Tchaikovsky City Academy in Russia, and the Darmstadt Summer Courses.

William Kinderman has been described by Alfred Brendel as a “very rare bird” on account of his ability to combine scholarship and performance. After studying music and philosophy at Dickinson College, the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, the University of Vienna, and Yale University, he received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. He is author of Beethoven: A Political Artist in Revolutionary Times (University of Chicago Press, 2020; German edition Molden, 2020; Mandarin translation 2025). His other books include Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations (1999), Mozart’s Piano Music (2006), Beethoven (2009), The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtág (2012), and Wagner’s Parsifal (2013); he also writes on literary and philosophical topics. As pianist, he has recorded Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and last sonatas and performs all of Beethoven’s piano concertos with orchestra. Kinderman’s research has explored the creative process of major composers; his Beethoven research and performance served as a basis for the Broadway play “33 Variations” by Moisés Kaufman. He has received a Killam Research Award and a Research Prize for lifetime achievement from the Humboldt Foundation. He served as scholarly advisor and co-curator for Vienna’s Beethoven Museum at Heiligenstadt, which opened in 2017, and contributed recordings to the museum. During the Beethoven anniversary year 2020, Kinderman gave performances and lecture recitals in Bonn, Jena, Vienna, Berlin, Oxford, Philadelphia, New York, Houston, and Boston. In 2021, he was an organizer of the conference held at Bonn on “Beethoven’s ‘Empire of the Mind’: Artistic ‘Effigies of the Ideal’ and the Cultural Politics of Resistance” with sponsorship of the Humboldt Foundation. Since the easing of the pandemic by September 2023, he has given presentations in Germany, Austria, Italy, Korea, and in many Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanning, Xi’an, Dalian, and Shenyang. Kinderman has taught as Guest Professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin, at the University of Munich. In Vienna, Kinderman was a Director’s Fellow at the International Research Center for the Humanities as well as Visiting Professor at the University of Art and Music. He is Distinguished Professor and inaugural Leo and Elaine Chair of Performance Studies at the Herb Alpert School of Music, University of California, Los Angeles.

williamkinderman.com

Pianist Robert Levin has performed throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia, appearing with the orchestras of Atlanta, Berlin, Birmingham, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Montreal, Philadelphia, Toronto, Utah and Vienna on the Steinway and with the Academy of Ancient Music, the English Baroque Soloists, the Handel & Haydn Society, the London Classical Players, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique on period pianos. Renowned for his improvised cadenzas in Classical period repertoire, Robert Levin has made recordings of a wide range of repertoire, including Bach’s complete keyboard concertos, the six English Suites and both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier (Hänssler Edition Bachakademie); a Mozart concerto cycle with Christopher Hogwood, Richard Egarr, Boyan Čičić, Laurence Cummings, and the Academy of Ancient Music (Decca/Oiseau Lyre and AAM); the Beethoven concertos with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (DG Archiv); the complete piano music of Dutilleux (ECM); Bernard Rands’ Preludes and Impromptu (Bridge); the complete Beethoven sonatas and variations for fortepiano and ’cello with Steven Isserlis (Hyperion); the Brahms, Hindemith, and Shostakovich viola sonatas and a collection of elegies and a series of Spanish and Argentine song transcriptions with Kim Kashkashian (ECM); the six Bach Partitas (Grand Prix International du Disque); the Schubert piano trios with Noah Bendix-Balgley and Peter Wiley (Le Palais des Dégustateurs); and the complete Mozart sonatas on Mozart’s Walter piano (ECM). A passionate advocate of new music, Robert Levin has commissioned and premiered numerous works, including John Harbison’s Second Sonata (2003), Yehudi Wyner’s piano concerto Chiavi in mano (Pulitzer Prize, 2006), Bernard Rands’ Preludes (2007), Thomas Oboe Lee’s Piano Concerto (2007), and Hans Peter Türk’s Träume (2012). He has a long partnerships with violist Kim Kashkashian and his wife, pianist Ya-Fei Chuang, in duo recitals and with orchestra, and with cellist Steven Isserlis. A noted Mozart scholar, Mr. Levin’s completions of Mozart’s Requiem, C-minor Mass, and other unfinished works have been recorded and performed throughout the world. He was Artistic Director of the Sarasota Music Festival from 2007 to 2016 and President of the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition (Leipzig, Germany) from 2002 to 2024.  He was awarded the Bach Medal of the City of Leipzig in 2018 and the Golden Mozart Medal by the International Mozarteum Foundation in 2024.  From 1993 to 2013 he was Dwight P. Robinson, Jr. Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and is Visiting Professor at The Juilliard School and International Chair at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. 

robertlevinmusic.com

In his own words, Birth: December 5^th 1943, in Paris / Death: expected on a 27^th of January—guess why—.Place and year so far unknown. Bruno Monsaingeon is a Paris-based violinist who has devoted himself to music, writing books, and making films.   Among these films his profiles of legendary performers, such as Yehudi Menuhin, Glenn Gould, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, David Oistrakh, Michael Tilson-Thomas, Paul Tortelier, Gennadi Roshdestvensky, Julia Varady, Murray Perahia, Marie-Claire Alain, Louis Kentner, Friederich Gulda, Nadia Boulanger, Viktoria Postnikova, Dezsö Ranki, Zoltan Kocsis, Andreï Chesnokov, Julius Katchen, Marie-Claire Alain, Gilles Apap, Francesco Libetta, the Alban Berg Quartet, the Artemis Quartet, Sviatoslav Richter, Grigory Sokolov, and more recently David Fray, Valeriy Sokolov, Piotr Anderszewski, Mstislav Rostropovich, Aleksey Shadrin, Francesco Piemontesi, The Arod Quartet, and Klaus Mäkelä have gained worldwide acclaim. Bruno Monsaingeon is also the author of seven books: Mademoiselle (conversations with Nadia Boulanger), Le dernier Puritain, Contrepoint à la ligne and Non, je ne suis pas du tout un excentrique, a series of three books containing the entire literary output of the great Canadian pianist, composer and writer, Glenn Gould, Richter, Écrits et Conversations(France Culture Muses Award, Pelléas 1999 Award), Éditions Van de Velde – Arte Éditions – Actes Sud, Passion Menuhin, l’Album d’une vie, Éditions Textuel – Arte Éditions, and in 2002, Glenn Gould: Journal d’une crise, followed by Correspondance de concert. 

“… and even when Ginastera gives you one piece with a close family likeness to another, you listen with a sense of renewal thanks to performances by Mariangela Vacatello of a superb zest, brio and imaginative scope… she has technique in spades, making her a front-runner with Argerich’s legendary live Three Argentinian Dances… no praise could be high enough for Vacatello’s achievement.” (Gramophone 2016)

 Born in Naples, Mariangela Vacatello made her debut at the age of 14 with Liszt’s First Piano Concerto and, at 17, established herself on the international stage by winning Second Prize at the Liszt Competition in Utrecht. She has been awarded prizes at the Busoni Competition in Bolzano, the Van Cliburn Competition in Texas, the Top of the World Competition in Norway, and the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, and has performed in over 800 concerts, from Milan’s Teatro alla Scala to extensive tours throughout Europe, the United States, China, and South Africa. For more than twenty years, she has been recognized for the curiosity and versatility of her interpretative horizons, as well as for the virtuosity and passion that characterize every work in her repertoire. Her discography includes Liszt’s 12 Transcendental Études, Debussy’s Études, the complete piano works of Alberto Ginastera, and the ten piano sonatas by Alexander Scriabin. In 2024, she became the first pianist to create a video project featuring all ten Scriabin sonatas, also presented in two episodes within the RAI program Dieci colori per 10 Sonate. She studied with Franco Scala, Riccardo Risaliti, and Dominique Merlet. She collaborates with IRCAM–Centre Pompidou in Paris and has given world premieres of works by Aperghis, Maresz, Stroppa, and Momi. She is frequently invited to serve as a jury member for competitions of the Geneva Federation, including the International Franz Liszt Competition in Utrecht, the UNISA Competition in Pretoria, and the Busoni Competition in Bolzano. For several years she has chosen to live in Umbria, combining her concert career with teaching activities in masterclasses and at the International Academy of Music in Pinerolo, and she is a tenured professor at the “Francesco Morlacchi” Conservatory in Perugia. In 2024, she began her role as Artistic Director of the Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte of Montepulciano.

mariangelavacatello.com