lya Kaler is one of the most outstanding personalities of the violin today, with a career ranging from that of soloist and recording artist to chamber musician and professor. He is the only violinist in the world to win the Gold Medal at three of the world’s most prestigious international violin competitions: the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow (1986), the Sibelius Competition in Helsinki (1985), and the Paganini Competition in Genoa (1981). Praised by Gramophone magazine as “the magician, bewitching our ears,” Kaler has earned rave reviews for his solo appearances with distinguished orchestras such as the Leningrad, Moscow, and Dresden Philharmonic Orchestras, the Montreal Symphony, the Danish and Berlin Radio Orchestras, the Moscow and Zurich Chamber Orchestras, and most major American orchestras.

Konstanty Andrzej Kulka studied violin at the State High School of Music in Gdańsk under the direction of Stefan Herman (graduated with honours in 1971). At the age of seventeen, he received a distinction at the Niccolò Paganini International Violin Competition in Genoa, but it was the ARD International Radio Competition in Munich in 1964 where he won the first prize that ushered him into his international career.

Bor­is Kuschnir was born into a musical fam­ily in Kiev in 1948. He stud­ied viol­in with Bor­is Belen­ky at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Con­ser­vatoire and cham­ber music with Valentin Ber­l­in­sky of the Borod­in Quar­tet. His many encoun­ters with Dmitri Shos­takovich (work­ing on his last quar­tets) and Dav­id Ois­trakh, with whom he also stud­ied, had a last­ing influ­ence on his artist­ic devel­op­ment. His career star­ted 1969 when he was one of the three win­ners of the Allunions-Com­pet­i­tion in Len­in­grad where, in the final, he per­formed the Beeth­oven Viol­in Con­certo with the Len­in­grad Sym­phony Orches­tra under the bat­on of Yuri Temirkan­ov.

Itzhak Rashkovsky - internationally renowned Russian-Israeli violinist and pedagogue, was awarded a Master’s Degree by the Samuel Rubin Israeli Academy of Music, Tel Aviv, where he studied with Professor Yair Kless. He has appeared worldwide as a soloist and chamber music player at prestigious concert venues, including Carnegie Hall and the Grand Hall of Moscow Conservatory. As a Professor of Violin at the Royal College of Music, London, he has become one of the leading and most sought-after teachers in the UK.

Jakub Jakowicz learned to play the violin from his father, Krzysztof Jakowicz, also as a student at the Fryderyk Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw. He is also the last student of one of the founders of the Polish violin school, Professor Tadeusz Wroński. He gave his first public concert at the age of eleven. In 1998, at the invitation of Krzysztof Penderecki, he performed at the composer’s festival in Kraków. In 2001, he debuted with the Munich Philharmonic under the direction of Pinchas Steinberg.

MARIUSZ SMOLIJ is considered one of the most exciting conductors of his generation. Frequent recording artists for NAXOS International, he has been consistently gaining international critical acclaim including praises by the New York Times for “compelling performances”. Maestro Smolij led over 130 orchestras in 28 countries on five continents appearing in some of the most prestigious concert halls of the world, including the Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York, Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, Zürich Tonhalle, Salle Gaveau in Paris, Concertgebauw in Amsterdam, and National Art Center in Beijing, China. In North America among many others, he conducted the Houston Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, Orchestra of the Chicago Lyric Opera, St. Louis Philharmonic, Rochester Philharmonic, Indianapolis Symphony, Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, New Orleans Philharmonic, Hartford Symphony and Symphony Nova Scotia.