“His mastery over each work made the rehearsals a time for excitement and pleasure. The result was a concert of great fulfilment for the large, expectant audience, who gave every sign of thoroughly enjoying the works on hand conducted by one of our country’s most promising young maestros.”

Edward Clark
Musical Opinion, St Petersburg, 2012

Award winning and critically acclaimed British conductor and composer Benjamin Ellin is currently Music Director of Thursford Productions, Principal Conductor of the Slaithwaite Philharmonic Orchestra, Music Director of Focus Opera and President of Pembroke Academy of Music, London.

In recent seasons Benjamin has performed with the English Chamber Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lille, Shanghai Opera House Orchestra, Gunma Symphony Orchestra (Japan), St Petersburg Symphony, Orchestre National de Montpellier, Teatro Massimo Palermo, Orchestra del Teatro Regio Turin, Russian State Symphony Orchestra, New Russian Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lyon, Orchestre Chambre de Catalogne and the Luxembourg Philharmonic amongst others. Immediate plans include return visits to orchestras in Japan, France, Russia, Canada and USA, combined with his commitments across the UK.

A multiple award winner, Benjamin was awarded 1st Prize and the Public Prize from the inaugural Evgeny Svetlanov International Conducting Competition in 2007. In September 2009 Benjamin was awarded the Barlow Endowment Prize for composition, becoming only the second British composer in twenty-five years to be awarded the prize. His subsequent commission for a trombone concerto was premiered by the New York Philharmonic’s Principal trombonist, Joseph Alessi, in April 2012. Benjamin’s debut composition CD, Three States at Play, was released in Spring 2012; “…Ellin’s is a musical voice well worth getting acquainted with…” (Richard Whitehouse, Gramophone Magazine, October 2012.)

Benjamin has received commissions from organisations including the Hallé Orchestra, Orchestre Chambre D’Auvergne (France), Shanghai Opera, Trio Chausson, Concordia Foundation, Maison de la Culture in Amiens and the Fort Macleod International Festival, Canada as well as soloists such as Rivka Golani, Pascal Contet, Robert Cohen, Andrei Korobeinikov, Veronika Ilinskaya and Ilona Domnich. His works have been performed at festivals and venues across Russia, France, Norway, Canada, China and throughout the UK. In 2010 Benjamin was a featured artist at the Imaginez Maintenant Festival in Amiens. Commissions now in progress include a new symphonic work for the Orchestre de Picardie, a major collaborative work with the Blackfoot people of Alberta, Canada and his first full length opera Welcome to Deen. In 2007 Benjamin became one of the first classical composers to sign a deal with the Prince’s Trust Music Publishing, and also featured in BBC Music Magazine in their Rising Stars feature.

Alongside his success with the 2009 Barlow Foundation, Benjamin was also presented with the highest honour of an eagle feather from the Siksika Chieftains in Canada as a reflection of gratitude for his composition ‘Siksika’, commissioned by Rivka Golani in 2010. In 2011 Benjamin was invited to attend a Royal reception at Buckingham Palace by Her Majesty the Queen and Prince Philip for young people working in the performing arts.

A committed, active and innovative figure in musical collaboration and access for all, Benjamin was Director of Music at the Pembroke Academy in South London from 2006-2010. In 2010 he was made President of the Academy as a reflection of his achievements over his tenure as Director. Benjamin’s ongoing relationship with London’s Southbank Centre has resulted in major collaborations with Dan Zanes. Benjamin also took a major role within the 2011 Festival of Britain as conductor, composer and arranger.

As a collaborator, Benjamin has enjoyed working closely with musicians from across the Middle East, Asia, North America and Russia, and has worked in dance, theatre and across a range of multi-media. In 2008 he began his close relationship with Ney Soloist Louai Alhenawi. Their debut London concert in 2008 featured Ellin’s Concerto for Ney and Orchestra Tafahum, and a debut album of the same name is planned for 2013.

“Ellin coaxed the orchestra and the chorus and showed how exciting a masterpiece this work (Belshazzar’s Feast) could be.”
Ongaku no Tomo Magazine, Japan, November 2010

“Benjamin Ellin is a fine and serious musician. I have no hesitation in recommending him.”
Sir Colin Davis, CH, London, 2010

“Other heroes, the conductor Benjamin Ellin and Orchestra Chambre de Catalogne; a true conspiracy of talents…”
Michèle Fizaine, Le Midi Libre, France, March 2010

Born in Pusan, Korea, Eun-Hwa Cho began to study compositon at Seoul National University and then continued her composition study under professor Hanspeter Kyburz and music theory under professor Joerg Mainka at Hochschule fuer Musik Hanns-Eisler, Berlin.

Cho’s music has been performed at major music festivals around the world including the Asian Contemporary Music Festival in Seoul, the Ultraschall Festival fuer neue Musik in Berlin, the Internationalen Ferienkursen fuer Neue Musik Darmstadt, Music today 21 in Tokyo, The 15th International Fesrival Musical Olympus in St.Petersburg, the Arcana Fesrival und the Klangspuren in Austria by ensembles and orchestras such as

Arditti Quartet, Molinari Quartet, Ensemble Modern, Tokyo Sinfonietta, Ensemble Recherche, Ensemble InterContemporain, the national Orchestra of Belgium, the KBS Symphony Orchestra and the state Hermitage Orchestra st. Petersburg.

She has been awarded the Hanns-Eisler Preis (First Prize, Berlin, 2002), first prize at Weimarer Fruehjarstage fuer zeitgenoessische Musik (2003), second prize at the Deuxieme Concours International de Composition du Quatuor Molinari (Montreal, 2005), Busoni Kompositionspreis (Berlin, Akademie der Kuenste, 2008) and Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition of Belgium (Grand Prize, Brussels, 2009).

Currently she teaches at the Hochschule fuer Musik Hanns-Eisler, Berlin.

With his extraordinary pianistic talents, Fazıl Say has been touching audiences and critics alike for more twenty-five years in a way that has become rare in the increasingly materialistic and elaborately organised classical music world. Concerts with this artist are something else. They are more direct, more open, more exciting; in short, they go straight to the heart. Which is exactly what the composer Aribert Reimann thought in 1987 when, during a visit to Ankara, he had the opportunity, more or less by chance, to appreciate the playing of the seventeen-year-old pianist. He immediately asked the American pianist David Levine, who was accompanying him on the trip, to come to the city’s conservatory, using the now much-quoted words: ‘You absolutely must hear him, this boy plays like a devil.’

Fazıl Say had his first piano lessons from Mithat Fenmen, who had himself studied with Alfred Cortot in Paris. Perhaps sensing just how talented his pupil was, Fenmen asked the boy to improvise every day on themes to do with his daily life before he went on to the essential piano exercises and studies. This contact with free creative processes and forms was the source of the immense improvisatory talent and the aesthetic outlook that make Fazıl Say the pianist and composer he is today. He has been commissioned to write music for the Salzburg Festival, the WDR, the Dortmund Konzerthaus, the Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern festivals and the Munich Biennale, among others. His output includes compositions for solo Keyboard and chamber music as well as solo concertos and large-scale orchestral works.

From 1987 onwards, Fazıl Say fine-tuned his skills as a classical pianist with David Levine, first at the Musikhochschule Robert Schumann in Düsseldorf and later in Berlin; this formed the aesthetic basis for his Mozart and Schubert interpretations in particular. His outstanding technique very quickly enabled him to master the so-called warhorses of the repertoire with sovereign ease. And it is precisely this blend of refinement (in Bach, Haydn, and Mozart) and virtuoso brilliance in the works of Liszt, Mussorgsky and Beethoven that gained him victory at the Young Concert Artists international competition in New York in 1994. Since then he has played with all the famous American and European orchestras and numerous leading conductors and has built up a multifaceted repertoire ranging from Bach, through the Viennese Classics (Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven) and the Romantics, right up to contemporary music, including his own piano compositions.

Guest appearances have taken Fazıl Say to countless countries on all five continents; the French newspaper Le Figaro called him ‘a genius’. In addition, he also appears regularly in chamber music: for many years he formed a fantastic duo with the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and among his other notable partners are the Argentinian cellist Sol Gabetta, the Borusan Quartet of Istanbul, and other Turkish instrumental soloists. …/.

From 2005 to 2010 he was an exclusive artist at the Dortmund Konzerthaus; during the 2010/11 season he was artist in residence at the Berlin Konzerthaus; and he was a focal point of the programme of the Schleswig-Holstein Festival in the summer of 2011. There have been further residencies and Fazıl Say festivals in Paris, Tokyo, Meran, Hamburg, and Istanbul. During the 2012/13 season Fazil Say is artist in residence at the Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt/ Main.

His recordings of works by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Gershwin and Stravinsky have been highly praised by the critics and won several prizes. Since 2003 Fazıl Say has been under exclusive contract to the Naive label. He lives in Istanbul and has a daughter.

Leonid Desyatnikov is one of the most successful living Russian composers.
Leonid Desyatnikov was born in 1955 in Kharkov, Ukraine. He is a graduate of the Leningrad Conservatory, where he studied composition and instrumentation. Desyatnikov has penned four operas, several cantatas and numerous vocal and instrumental compositions. The composer defines his style as “the emancipation of consonance, the transformation of the banal, minimalism with a human face”; his favourite genre is the “tragically naughty bagatelle”. His principal compositions include: Rosenthal’s Children (an opera in two acts; libretto, Vladimir Sorokin), commissioned by the Bolshoi Theatre; Poor Liza (a chamber opera in one act; libretto, Leonid Desyatnikov, after the novel by Nikolai Karamzin); Gift (a cantata based on the verses of Gavrila Derzhavin); The Leaden Echo (a work for voice(s) and instruments based on the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins); and The Rite of Winter 1949 (a symphony for chorus, soloists and orchestra).

Desyatnikov has been collaborating with Gidon Kremer since 1996 as a composer (Wie der Alte Leiermann…; the chamber version of Sketches to Sunset; Russian Seasons) as well as arranging the works of Astor Piazzolla, among which is the tango-operita Maria de Buenos-Aires and Quatro Estaciones Porteñas.

Desyatnikov wrote the scores for the films Sunset (1990), Lost in Siberia (1991), Hammer and Sickle (1994), Moscow Nights (Katya Izmailova) (1994), Giselle’s Mania (1995), Prisoner of the Mountains (1996), All That Is Tender (1996), Moscow (2000), His Wife’s Diary (2000) and The Target (2010).

He was awarded a Golden Ram prize and the Grand Prix of the IV International Cinema Music festival in Bonn for his score for Moscow and the special prize of the Window to Europe Cinema Festival in Vyborg.

In 2006 the opera Rosenthal’s Children received the special jury prize of The Golden Mask National Theatre Award. In 2003 he was awarded the State Prize of Russia.

Olga Viсtorova, Russian composer, was born in 1960. She is a graduate of the Kharkov Music School for gifted children. In 1984 she graduated with honors from the St.-Petersburg State Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory where she studied composition with professor B.Arapov and folklore. In 1986 she completed her postgraduate course at the same conservatory.

Since 1996 she is a member of The Composers’ Union of Russia.

Winner of the European Composer Award (Berlin, 2012). Diploma winner at the All-Union Competition of young composers. Laureate of All-Ukrainian Competition of young composers. Governor’s of Sverdlovsk region grant holder.

Nowadays she teaches composition and theory of music at the Ural State Conservatory. She is also known as a leader of Contemporary Music Ensemble of the Philharmonic society of Yekaterinburg. Olga Victorova has composed some thirty works ranging from solo pieces to the large orchestra with a partiality for smaller ensembles.

Her music has been performed in Belgium, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Russia, Spain, the USA.

She is a regular guest at various festivals in Russia and abroad: the Festival of Radio France, Musique de notre temps (France), Centara Corporation International New Music Festival (Canada), European dance and music open air festival (Luxembourg), Moscow Autumn, Russia – Finland. Dialog of XXI century, The International Gaudeamus Music Week, Russia Femina (The Netherlands).