Jury

Sonia Simmenauer was born in the USA and grew up in Paris. From 1982 to 2009 she lived in Hamburg, where she founded Impresariat Simmenauer in 1989 with the goal of creating an agency exclusively for string quartets. The Alban Berg Quartet, the Cleveland Quartet, the Guarneri Quartet and the Tokyo String Quartet are among the artists Simmenauer represented through their final days on stage. In 2009, Impresariat Simmenauer moved its offices to Berlin, and today represents a dozen internationally respected string quartets, among them the Arditti Quartet, the Artemis Quartet, the Belcea Quartet, the Quatuor Ebene, the Cuarteto Casals, the Jerusalem Quartet, the Quatuor Modigliani, the Schumann Quartett. While the string quartet remains a large part of her work, Simmenauer signs also responsible for some very fine soloists such as violinists Isabelle Faust and Vadim Gluzman, cellists Jean-Guihen Queyras and Alisa Weilerstein, pianist Piotr Anderszewski, Alexander Melnikov, Elena Bashkirova and more.
Sonia Simmenauer wrote a widely received book about the life within a string quartet (Muss es Sein/ 2008) and has been named Professor at the Musikhochschule in Hamburg (2009) for a new field called: “Music Transmission”.
Sonia Simmenauer passed the direction of the company in the Summer of 2020 to her son Arnold Simmenauer. Since then, she has shifted her focus on working with young artists at the edge of building their career.

Hailed as “an artist who combines a probing, restless intellect with enormous beauty of tone; ” Ms. Kashkashians’ work as performing and recording artist and pedagogue has been recognized worldwide. She won the coveted Grammy Award for her recording of Ligeti and Kurtag solo viola works in 2013, and received the George Peabody Medal and Switzerland’s Golden Bow Award for her contributions to music. In 2016, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2020, named an Honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music. As soloist, Kashkashian has appeared with the orchestras of Berlin, London, Vienna, Milan, New York and Cleveland in collaboration with Eschenbach, Mehta, Welser-Moest, Kocsis, Dennis Russel Davies, Blomstedt, and Holliger.
Recital appearances include the great halls of Vienna, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Tokyo, Athens, London, New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Philadelphia where she appears with the Trio Tre Voce, and in duo partnerships with pianist Robert Levin and percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky. Ms. Kashkashian has forged creative relationships with composers Kurtág, Penderecki, Schnittke, Kancheli, and Pärt and commissioned compositions from Eötvös, Ueno, Olivero, Larcher, Auerbach, Mansurian, and Hosokawa.
Ms. Kashkashian’s long association with ECM Records has yielded a discography that has garnered an abundance of praise and
international awards including a Grammy for her solo recording of works by Ligeti and Kurtág, a Cannes Classical Award for the viola concertos of Kurtág, Bartók, and Eötvös, an Edison Prize for her recording with pianist Robert Levin of the Brahms viola sonatas and the Opus Klassik prize for her recording of the unaccompanied cello suites of T.S. Bach. She coaches chamber music and viola at New England Conservatory of Music and is founder and artistic director of Music for Food, a musician-led hunger relief initiative.

Jonáš Krejčí was born in 1969 in London and was raised in Prague, where he began cello lessons at the age of six. While at the Prague Conservatory, he was invited to study under William Pleeth in London. Upon graduating from the Prague Conservatory, he entered the University of Southern California on a full scholarship, studying there for four years with Lynn Harrell. During his studies, he won an audition to take part in the New York String Orchestra under the baton of Alexander Schneider. After finishing his studies in California he moved to Vienna, where he spent a year playing in the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra as well as performing in chamber ensembles. Mr. Krejčí studied chamber music with Milan Škampa of the Smetana Quartet and Walter Levin of the LaSalle Quartet.

Moving on to pursue a full time chamber music career, Mr. Krejčí was a member of the Škampa Quartet, Petersen Quartet and Schulhoff Quartet. Currently he is the cellist of the Pražák Quartet. He performs regularly throughout Europe, North and South America, Japan and Australia. He has appeared in such venues as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Musikverein and Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, the Tonhalle Zurich, the Philharmonie Berlin, Suntory Hall in Tokyo and Carnegie Hall in New York. With the Škampa Quartet, he was the first Artist in Residence of London’s Wigmore Hall, performing there dozens of times over the course of the residency. He has collaborated with such artists as François Dumont, Josef Suk, Lars Vogt, Nikolai Demidenko, Melvyn Tan, Wolfgang Holzmair, Boris Pergamenschikov, Juliane Banse and Wolfram Rieger. He is also Principal Cellist of the Vienna Chamber Orchestra and cellist of the Korngold Ensemble.

Mr. Krejčí has given masterclasses at such institutions as the Royal Academy of Music in London and the Winterthur Conservatory in Switzerland. Mr. Krejčí has been invited numerous times by the Hyogo Performing Arts Center in Japan as a visiting artist to perform with, coach and mentor its members. He was selected to coach the prizewinning quartet of the Princess Christina Competition in the Netherlands, and was a member of the string quartet jury at the ARD Competition in Munich. Mr. Krejčí also teaches cello and chamber music at the International Music Master Classes in Slavonice, Czech Republic.
He has recorded extensively for the Praga Digitals/Aparte Music, Supraphon, Capriccio and VMS labels. He has also made numerous broadcast recordings for the BBC, Radio France, Minnesota Public Radio, ORF in Austria, and Český Rozhlas in Prague among others.
Mr. Krejčí plays a Paolo Testore cello from 1761 (Milano).

Born in Barcelona in 1980, ABEL TOMÀS began his musical studies with his father and the violin with his uncle. Later he was a student of Zakhar Bron and Serguei Fatkouline at the Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía and of Viktor Tretjakov at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne.

Abel has been awarded prizes at various national and international competitions in Spain and Argentina. As soloist he has appeared with various orchestras including Orquesta Sinfónica de Barcelona and Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife and with distinguished conductors such as James Judd, Junichi Hirokami, Victor Pablo Perez and Zubin Mehta. He has given numerous violin recitals, collaborating with pianists like Juan Carlos Garvayo, Orli Shaham, Eldar Nebolsin, and Hyo-Sun Lim. As a chamber musician, he has also appeared with Gerard Caussé, Marta Gulyas, Seguro Ito and Kennedy Moretti.

At sixteen years of age, he Abel was a founding member of the internationally recognized Cuarteto Casals, a chamber music ensemble which maintains a full calendar of artistic activity, appearing in the most renowned halls in Europe, Latin America, the United States and Japan. Since 2004 the quartet has recorded exclusively for Harmonia Mundi for whom they have recorded numerous works. The quartet has been awarded the Spanish National Music Prize and the Prize of the City of Barcelona.

Together with his brother Arnau Tomàs Realp and pianist Hyo-Sun Lim, Abel is a founding member of the Ludwig Trio, with whom he has recorded music of Beethoven, whose Triple Concerto the trio will soon record with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia.

Aside from concertizing, Abel teaches violin and chamber music at the Escuela Superior de Música de Catalunya, and additionally gives masterclasses in both Europe and the United States.