Winners of the renowned 2018 International Wigmore Hall String Competition and the 2018 Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition, the Goldmund Quartet was selected by the European Concert Hall Organisation as Rising Stars of the 2019/20 season. Since 2019, they have been performing on Antonio Stradivari's Paganini Quartet of instruments, provided by the Nippon Music Foundation. In addition, the Quartet was awarded the Jürgen Ponto Foundation Music Prize in March 2020 and the Freiherr von Waltershausen Prize in December 2020. In 2016, the Quartet won the Bavarian Arts Promotion Prize and the Karl Klinger Prize of the ARD Competition.

Nicholas Canellakis has become one of the most sought-after and innovative cellists of his generation, praised as a “superb young soloist” (The New Yorker). A multifaceted artist, Canellakis has forged a unique voice, combining his talents as soloist, chamber musician, curator, filmmaker, composer/arranger, and teacher.

Canellakis was recently appointed to the cello faculty of the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, his alma mater. Canellakis is an artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, with which he performs regularly in Alice Tully Hall and on tour internationally, including London’s Wigmore Hall, The Louvre in Paris, the Seoul Arts Center in Korea, and the Shanghai and Taipei National Concert Halls.

Praised for his “ravishing and simply gorgeous” performances in The Washington Post, pianist David Fung is widely recognized for interpretations that are elegant and refined, yet intensely poetic and uncommonly expressive. He garnered international attention as laureate of the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition in Brussels and the Arthur Rubinstein Piano International Masters Competition in Tel Aviv, where he was further distinguished by the Chamber Music and Mozart Prizes. Mr. Fung is the first piano graduate of the Colburn Conservatory in Los Angeles, where he studied with John Perry, and later worked with Claude Frank and Peter Frankl at Yale University, and Arie Vardi at the Hannover Hochschüle für Musik. He is also a Steinway Artist.

Acclaimed international pianist, Bernadette Harvey, was awarded the Centenary Medal in 2000 by then Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, for her contribution to Australian Music. Bernadette has won many accolades since her first medal in a Sydney Eisteddfod at the age of two and a half, including the ABC ‘Young Performer of the Year’ in 1987. She appeared with the Tokyo Quartet and the Shanghai Quartet in the premiere of Carl Vine’s Piano Quintet, Fantasia in 2013. She and the Shanghai Quartet later presented the Australian premiere of the Bright Sheng Piano Quintet, Dance Capriccio. Bernadette is renowned for championing new solo piano works, many of which are recorded on the Tall Poppies label. She is a Senior Lecturer at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. She now joins Artistic Director Peter Rejto as Co-Director of the Festival.

Kristina Mascher-Turner, former principal horn of the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra (Flemish Radio Orchestra), hails from Albany, Oregon, and is once again based in Brussels. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Douglas Hill) and the Hanns Eisler Conservatory in Berlin (Kurt Palm), and also studied privately with Fergus McWilliam of the Berlin Philharmonic. Early in her career, she was engaged in various chamber and symphony orchestras, including the Odense Symfoniorkester in Denmark, and three tours as principal horn with the Gustav-Mahler-Juge Dorchester under the direction of Claudio Abbado, Pierre Boulez, and Kent Nagano.

Praised for her “seductive artistry” and “rare grace” (Classical Voice North America), violinist Clara Neubauer is establishing herself as a deeply expressive and authentic artist. She is a recipient of the Kovner Fellowship from the Juilliard School, as well as winner of the Peter Mennin Prize for Outstanding Achievement and Leadership in Music. Clara received the Ana Chumachenco Award at the Kronberg Academy Masterclasses and was chosen to perform as soloist with the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra Heilbronn. Clara received her BM from The Juilliard School, as a student of Li Lin and Itzhak Perlman, and is currently pursuing her MM as a student of Catherine Cho and Itzhak Perlman.

Violist Paul Neubauer’s exceptional musicality and effortless playing have earned him praise as “a master musician” from The New York Times. In 2025, he will release two albums for First Hand Records, each featuring the final works of two great composers: an all-Bartók album, which includes the revised version of the Viola Concerto, and a Shostakovich album, featuring the monumental Viola Sonata.

At age 21, Mr. Neubauer was appointed principal violist of the New York Philharmonic, a position he held for six years. He has since appeared as a soloist with over 100 orchestras, including the New York, Los Angeles, and Helsinki Philharmonics, the Chicago, National, St. Louis, Detroit, Dallas, San Francisco, and Bournemouth Symphonies, and the Mariinsky, Santa Cecilia, English Chamber, and Beethovenhalle Orchestras.

Artistic director Peter Rejto is committed to presenting the finest chamber music, both well-loved works and new, unfamiliar ones, performed by some of the world’s finest musicians. Highlights of his international career as a cellist include the world premiere of Gerard Schurmann’s Gardens of Exile with the Bournemouth Symphony broadcast live over the BBC, and the recording of Miklós Rózsa’s Cello Concerto in Hungary. Mr. Rejto is a founding member of the Los Angeles Piano Quartet and a former professor of the University of Arizona School of Music as well as professor emeritus at the Oberlin College Music Conservatory. He has directed the programming and selected the musicians for every Festival, beginning with the first in 1994.

At the age of seventeen, Axel Strauss won the silver medal at the Enescu Competition in Romania and has been recognized with many other awards, including top prizes in the Bach, Wieniawski, and Kocian competitions, and in 1998 he won the international Naumburg Violin Award in New York. Later that same year he made his American debut at the Library of Congress and his New York debut at Alice Tully Hall. Mr. Strauss studied with Dorothy DeLay at The Juilliard School, and since 2012 he has been Professor of Violin at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University in Montreal. He previously took part in our twenty-sixth Festival in 2019, and this year marks his eighth Festival appearance.