Acclaimed as a cultural leader in his native Armenia and increasingly in demand on the international stage, Sergey Smbatyan is founder, Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra. In September 2019, he became Principal Conductor of the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra following highly successful tours of Germany, Austria and the United States with the orchestra, including performances at the Berlin Philharmonie, Vienna’s Musikverein and Carnegie Hall.

Armed with the experience of building a symphony orchestra from scratch, Sergey Smbatyan has created four other orchestras in recent years. In 2015 he founded the 24/04 Orchestra to commemorate the centenary of the Armenian Genocide and the “Generation of Independence” All-Armenian Choir and Orchestra to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Armenia’s independence. He also founded the UNICEF Children’s Chamber Orchestra, dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Pan‑Armenian Symphony Orchestra, an initiative intended to unite Armenians around the world. The remit of his work as educator and innovator extends to "DasA", a high school project offering a close-up experience with classical music.

Sergey Smbatyan’s guest conducting career has flourished in recent seasons, leading to concerts with Sinfonia Varsovia, the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the Dresden Philharmonic, the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra and, among others, the Orchestra of the Komische Oper Berlin. He returned to the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra during the 2021/2022 season for a European tour comprising concerts at the Berliner Philharmonie and the Vienna Musikverein and is set to direct the օrchestra’s first UK tour in the 2022/2023 season.

Alexey Shor was born in Ukraine in 1970, immigrated to Israel in 1991, and now lives primarily in the USA. His compositions have been performed at some of the most prestigious concert halls, including Wiener Musikverein, Berlin Philharmonie, Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center (Washington DC), Great Hall of Moscow Conservatory, Mariinsky Theatre (St. Petersburg), Kremlin Palace (Moscow), The Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Gasteig (Munich), Wigmore Hall (London), Teatro Argentina (Rome) and many others. Concerts with his music have been broadcast on MediciTV, Mezzo and Euronews. Mr Shor’s music has been showcased on Fox Business News and the websites of Bloomberg News, the New Yorker, Yahoo and the Huffington Post. The Overture to his ballet “Crystal Palace” was performed at the 40th Gramophone Classical Music Awards ceremony in London. In 2018 he has been awarded an honorary professorship at the Komitas State Conservatory of Yerevan. In 2022 Mr.Shor has been appointed as Yehudi Menuhin School’s first associate composer.´

Mr. Shor’s scores are published by Breitkopf & Hartel, Universal Edition and P.Jurgenson.CDs with his compositions have been issued by Warner Classics, DECCA, SONY Classics, Naxos, Delos, Berlin Classics and Melodiya.Mr. Shor is the Composer-In-Residence for the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra.Many internationally acclaimed artists have performed Mr Shor’s music, including (in alphabetical order) Behzod Abduraimov, Salvatore Accardo, Ray Chen, Steven Isserlis, Evgeny Kissin, Denis Kozukhin, Shlomo Mintz, Mikhail Pletnev, Gil Shaham, Yeol Eum Son, Yekwon Sunwoo, Maxim Vengerov, Nikolaj Znaider and many others. He also holds a Ph.D. in mathematics.

Valentin Silvestrov was born in Kiev in 1937. He started studies of music at the age of fifteen first as self-learner, and then, between 1955-58, went to an evening music school. From 1958 to 1964 he studied composition and counterpoint with Boris Lyatoshinsky and Lev Revutsky respectively at Kiev Conservatory. He has been a freelance composer in Kiev from 1970 to 2022, fled from Ukraine in 2022 to Germany and currently lives in Berlin.

Silvestrov is considered one of the leading representatives of the "Kiev avant-garde", which came to public attention around 1960 and was violently criticized by the proponents of the conservative Soviet musical aesthetic. In the 1960s and 1970s his music was hardly played in his homeland, while premieres, if given at all, were heard only primarily in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), or in the West.

In recent decades he has dispensed with the conventional compositional devices of the avant-garde and discovered a style comparable to western "post-modernism". The name he has given to this style is "metamusic", a shortened form of "metaphorical Music". In a certain sense, "metamusic" stands for a universal style and a universal language. Since 2001/02, Silvestrov has again been working with small forms and "pure" melodies, composing numerous cycles ("families", "colonies") for various small instrumentations (more than 260 cycles for piano solo): waltzes, lullabies, postludes, nocturnes, barcaroles, pastorals, serenades. Since 2005, Silvestrov has again increasingly devoted himself to choral music, particularly to sacred choral music which, however, is not intended for liturgical use.

The Italian conductor Gianluca Marcianò has been increasingly in demand since his opera debut with Croatian National Opera in 2007. Marcianò works with opera houses in Oviedo, Minsk, Ljubljana and Yerevan, as well as in the UK.

Marcianò is the Artistic Director of the Al Bustan Festival in Beirut. He is also the founder and the Artistic Director of the Festival Suoni dal Golfo in Lerici and the Principal Guest Conductor of the National Academic Bolshoi Theatre of Belarus. From 2011 to 2014 he held the position of Musical Director/Principal Conductor of the Tbilisi State Opera. From 2017 till 2019 Gianluca Marcianò was the Principal Conductor of Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad.

As an orchestral conductor, Marcianò has worked with many great instrumentalists, such as: Gautier Capuçon, Renaud Capuçon, Arabella Steinbacher, Anna Tifu, Francesca Dego, Steven Isserlis, Maria Joao Pires, David Geringas, Khatia Buniatishvili, Sergei Krylov, Sergei Nakariakov, Denis Kozhukhin and others.

His has conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the English Chamber Orchestra, the National Chamber Orchestra of Armenia, Polish Baltic Philharmonic, Wroclaw Philharmonic, the Georgian Philharmonic, the Moscow City Russian Philharmonic, the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto, the Lebanese Philharmonic Orchestra, the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Beijing Symphony Orchestra and many others.