Jury

After graduating from the Toho Gakuen School of Music, the pianist Hiroe Arai moved from Japan to Germany, where she completed her studies at the Berlin University of the Arts, followed by postgraduate studies at the Karlsruhe University of Music. She studied with Prof. Sadako Matsuoka, Prof. Klaus Hellwig, Prof. Wolfgang Manz and Prof. Bruno Canino.

During her studies at the Toho Gakuen School of Music she had the opportunity to perform with the Toho Gakuen Orchestra under the direction of Alexander Schneider and later with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, the Baden-Baden Philharmonic Orchestra, the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra and other renowned orchestras. During her postgraduate studies in Karlsruhe, she gave a solo concert at Corvey Castle.

After returning to Japan, she established herself as a sought-after soloist and chamber musician and regularly gives solo concerts. She has already released several CDs on the Japanese label Nami Records, such as "Hiroe Arai plays Schumann, Webern, Berg", "Chopin Complete Etudes Op.10 & Op.25" and "Hiroe Arai plays favourite pieces", which were selected as special editions by Record Geijutsu magazine. Her next album "Hiroe Arai Piano Recital" will be released in spring.

In addition to her career as a musician, Hiroe Arai is also involved as a teacher. She gives master classes and is an adjudicator at competitions both in Japan and abroad. She is currently a professor at the Toho Gakuen School of Music and heads the piano department at the Toho Gakuen School of Music for Children as well as at the Sengawa and Meguro schools.

Markus Bellheim is a pianist who performs on international stages and at festivals. His recordings have been awarded various prizes, including the German Record Critics' Prize. His career was shaped by winning the international Messiaen Competition in Paris in 2000 and by his artistic collaboration with Yvonne Loriod.

Markus Bellheim's concert repertoire includes the complete piano works of Olivier Messiaen. as well as those of Johann Sebastian Bach, who forms another focal point in Bellheim's work. Markus Bellheim regularly gives master classes at home and abroad. Since the winter semester of 2011, he has been professor of piano at the University of Music and Theatre in Munich. He works as a freelancer and author for the Munich publishing house G. Henle Verlag.

Michel Béroff was born in France in 1950. After graduating from the Paris Conservatoire in 1966, he won first prize at the first Olivier Messiaen International Piano Competition the following year. Since then, he has been considered one of the most outstanding interpreters of Messiaen's music. He has performed with the world's most renowned orchestras under the baton of conductors such as Abbado, Barenboim, Bernstein, Boulez, Dohnányi, Doráti, Dutoit, Eschenbach, Gielen, Inbal, Jochum, Leinsdorf, Masur, Ozawa, Previn, Rostropovich, Sinopoli, Solti, Tennstedt, Tilson Thomas and Zinman. He has been very active as a chamber music partner, playing with artists such as Martha Argerich, Barbara Hendricks, Jean-Philippe Collard, Augustin Dumay, Pierre Amoyal and Lynn Harrell.

As a conductor, Michel Béroff has conducted the chamber orchestra of La Scala in Milan, the Russian State Orchestra, the Orchestre National de Lyon, the Orchestre National de Lille, the Cannes chamber orchestra, the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra and the Montréal Youth Orchestra.

Professor Emeritus at the Paris Conservatoire, where he taught for 25 years, Michel Béroff regularly gives masterclasses in many countries, including Japan, China, USA, Italy, Germany and France.

Michel Béroff has been an exclusive EMI artist for over 25 years and has released more than 50 recordings, including the complete works for piano and orchestra by Liszt, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, conducted by Seiji Ozawa and Kurt Masur. He has recorded Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand with the London Symphony Orchestra and Claudio Abbado for Deutsche Grammophon. His latest CDs include the complete piano music of Debussy. Michel Béroff has been awarded the "Grand Prix du Disque" five times.

As editor, he has contributed to a new edition of Debussy's piano music for Wiener Urtext. In 2006, he realised a series of fifteen master classes on French music for the Japanese network NHK.

He has served as a jury member in many important piano competitions, including the Tchaikovsky, Van Cliburn, Leeds, Clara Haskil, Rubinstein and Marguerite Long competitions. Many of his students have won top prizes in international competitions, the most recent being Seong-Jin Cho, who won the Chopin Competition in Warsaw.

Richard Brauncan look back on a varied career as a soloist and chamber musician, as a university teacher, publicist and music curator.

After studying with Hans Leygraf and Yvonne Lefébure, he has performed in most European countries, the USA, Japan, China and Korea. His commitment to contemporary music has led to artistic collaborations with composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel. He also works as a publicist and jury member and was artistic director of the international music festival "The Next Generation" in Dortmund. He gives master classes and holds lectures and seminars on piano-related topics.

After many years of teaching at the Musikhochschule in Dortmund, which he also directed for 13 years, he was a professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln from 2004 to 2017. He has had very close ties with Korea for many years. He also taught for several years at Chung-Ang University in Seoul.

Jacob Leuschner, born in Freiburg in 1974, studied in Freiburg and Lübeck. His most important teachers were Helmut Barth, Michel Béroff, Konrad Elser and Leonard Hokanson.

Since 1989 he has performed as a soloist and sought-after chamber music partner in many European countries, Japan, South Korea, China and the USA and is a guest at numerous international festivals. He was a multiple participant in the support project "Bundesauswahl Konzerte Junger Künstler" of the German Music Council.

Awards at important piano competitions testify to his artistic standing: Viotti (Vercelli), Beethoven (Vienna), Schubert (Dortmund), Mozart (Salzburg), Leeds, Rina Sala Gallo (Monza), German Music Competition, German University Competition - to name only the most important.

He is also the recipient of the Possehl Music Prize, the Kai-Uwe-von-Hassel Prize and the Wiesbaden Mozart Prize.

Jacob Leuschner taught at the Musikhochschule Lübeck and was a visiting professor at the Hochschule für Musik FRANZ LISZT in Weimar. From 2008 to 2014 he held a professorship at the Musikhochschule Köln, before accepting a call to the Musikhochschule Detmold. He regularly gives master classes in many European countries, Japan, China and Korea.

His repertoire ranges from the Virginalists to the present day, with a focus on the masters of Viennese Classicism. He has performed the complete piano sonatas of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in concert cycles on several occasions.

In addition, he is active as a juror at international piano competitions and as an editor, and has dealt intensively with historical keyboard instruments. He is the founder and artistic director of the Brahms Piano Competition Detmold.

His discography includes numerous chamber music works, such as the complete works for cello and piano by Reger with Guido Schiefen (Oehms Classics), as well as the late Beethoven sonatas and Liszt transcriptions, among others. In 2017, in addition to two solo CDs, a complete recording of Mozart's sonatas for piano and violin with violinist Keiko Urushihara was released (on Nippon Acoustic Records), which was enthusiastically acclaimed by the Japanese specialist press and received the "Excellence Award" from the Japanese National Cultural Office. Most recently, a recording of Beethoven's "Diabelli Variations" was released in December 2019 on the Perfect Noise label.
 

Inge-Susann Römhild completed her studies at the Hanover State University of Music and Drama with Karl-Heinz Kämmerling and was awarded the Lower Saxony Young Artists Scholarship in 1985.

Twice Inge-Susann Römhild won the Federal Selection of Concerts of Young Artists of the German Music Council and, together with the Beethoven Trio Ravensburg, prizes and scholarships at the German Music Competition and at international competitions in Colmar and Florence.

From 1980 to 1988 she taught as a lecturer at the Hanover State University of Music, Drama and Media and in 1987 took up a professorship in chamber music, accompaniment and song and instrumental accompaniment at the Lübeck University of Music. Numerous worldwide concert tours and radio and CD recordings (cpo) with various ensembles completed her artistic career.

In 1994 Inge-Susann Römhild was elected Rector, 2008-2014 President of the University of Music Lübeck. In 1997 she took on the honorary presidency of the Landesmusikrat Schleswig-Holstein for five years. As a member of the Arts University Advisory Board of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, she contributed her experience in 2014-2018. Since 1995, she has been appointed to the board of the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival Foundation by the Minister Presidents of Schleswig-Holstein to this day.

In addition to her teaching and artistic activities, Inge-Susann Römhild has taught as a lecturer and artistic director at numerous master classes and is regularly invited as a jury member to competitions such as the German Music Competition

Catherine Vickers, a native of Canada, studied there and then in Europe as a Canada Council Scholar. She won the Busoni Prize and Gold Medal of the Concorso Pianistico Internazionale F. Busoni by a "unanimous decision of the jury" and was also a prize-winner in the Sydney International Piano Competition. After many years as a professor at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, she was appointed to the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt am Main. For many years she has given concerts in East Asia, Europe and North America. Her repertoire includes standard works of piano literature as well as avant-garde and contemporary compositions. The first three volumes of her piano exercises for new music ("Die Hörende Hand") were published by Schott Verlag. She regularly appears as a guest at international festivals for new music, is a sought-after lecturer at international master classes and is also invited as a jury member to various international competitions for piano and for chamber music.

The conductor Florian Ludwig has been teaching as professor of orchestral conducting at the Detmold University of Music since 2015. He went through a classical conducting career that took him to various German city theatres. After positions at the Nationaltheater Mannheim and the Theater Bremen, where he played a major role in the orchestra's success under the artistic direction of Klaus Pierwoß, first as second and then, from 2003, as first conductor, he succeeded from 2008 to 2017 as general music director in Hagen in significantly increasing the orchestra's popularity and reputation both regionally and nationally. In 2014/15, his programming and the artistic and cross-stylistic development of the Philharmonic Orchestra were honoured by the Association of German Music Publishers with its award for the best annual programme of all orchestras in the German-speaking world. Both the extraordinary range of the repertoire, which included all epochs of classical orchestral music and also crossover projects with bands from the jazz, rock and pop fields, and special concert formats in which he also included cabaret artists such as Jochen Malmsheimer and Bernd Gieseking were praised.

From 2020 to 2022, he was interim general music director of the Giessen Philharmonic Orchestra and the Giessen City Theatre, where he put an artistic exclamation mark on the Corona era with, among other things, a concert performance of Tristan und Isolde.

Florian Ludwig has conducted his own productions at the Wuppertaler Bühnen, the Volksoper Wien and the Staatstheater Braunschweig and is a welcome guest conductor with the Bremen Philharmonic, the Munich and Brandenburg Symphonies and the MDR Symphony Orchestra Leipzig. He has also conducted the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, the Kuopio Symphony Orchestra in Finland and the Kaunas Symphony Orchestra in Lithuania. Since 2019, he has had an ongoing collaboration with the Kammeroper in Rheinsberg.

The conductor's repertoire is characterised by great diversity and openness to the new and unknown. Convincing and rousing music-mediating concepts and approaching the audience are particularly close to Florian Ludwig's heart. "Music can overcome borders and make language barriers disappear. Music creates togetherness where before there was only separation. That is why its social significance is more important today than ever before.