British-Austrian composer Noah Max’s output spans opera, orchestral and chamber music. In 2021 his string trio Sojourn won The Clements Prize and was performed by members of the Piatti Quartet at Conway Hall. His music has been performed at the Royal Festival Hall, Wigmore Hall and the Royal Albert Hall’s Elgar Room in London, as well as Vienna’s Musikverein, Altalena Festival in Budapest, Uilenburgersjoel Synagogue in Amsterdam and the Paderewski Academy in Poland.

Max recently spent five years bringing his debut opera A Child In Striped Pyjamas to the stage, culminating in a sold-out premiere production at London’s Cockpit Theatre in January 2023. The opera was lauded by critics as “emotionally ambitious and vocally eloquent” (The Telegraph) and “marvellously scored… A remarkable achievement for a young composer” (The Arts Desk). Max was interviewed about the opera by The Sunday Times and BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, with excerpts from the piece also broadcast on RTÉ Radio. Further revivals of the production are planned for 2023/24 and beyond.

Max’s debut album Songs of Loneliness was released on Toccata Classics in 2022; this year he returns to the recording studio with the Tippett Quartet and Sir Michael Morpurgo. He is Composer-in-Residence at Thaxted Festival, where his Quartet No.2 was premiered by the Tippett Quartet in July 2023; the festival has since commissioned Symphony No.1 to be premiered by the London Mozart Players on 21 June 2024. Other upcoming projects include a performance of Max’s Phantasy Quintet at Thaxted Festival on 5 July 2024 by Echo Ensemble.

With a creative life that embraces music and painting, poetry and cinema, Max enjoys illuminating the relationships between different mediums. As a conductor he has assisted Jonathan Cohen and Arcangelo at the BBC Proms and conducted Endymion Ensemble at Wigmore Hall. Max’s artworks have displayed at the National Portrait Gallery. His columns have been printed in The Irish Times, The Strad and The Jewish Chronicle; he has contributed to BBC Music Magazine and has been interviewed for Classical Music, Opera Today and BBC Radio 3’s In Tune.

István Varga studied at the Liszt Academy of Music (László Mező), the Belgrade Academy of Music (Viktor Jakovcic) and the Paris Conservatoire (Maurice Gendron). Until 1999 he lived in Yugoslavia, where he taught at the Belgrade and Novi Sad Academies of Music.

He founded the chamber orchestra Camerata Academica and the Goldberg String Trio, considered the leading ensembles in Yugoslavia. He has performed at all the major festivals and with all the major orchestras in the former Yugoslavia. He has been awarded the Prize of the Yugoslav Composers’ Association and the Gold Medal of the Serbian Cultural Association, the highest professional award in the country.

In 1999 he moved to Hungary, where he is currently a cello teacher at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music. He is a member of the Auer Trio with Balázs Fülei and Péter Kováts, and a regular chamber partner of pianist Gábor Csalog.

He has performed as a soloist at the Budapest Spring Festival, the Budapest Autumn Festival, the ‘Arcus Temporum’ Pannonhalma Arts Festival, the International Bartók Seminar and Festival, and with the Hungarian Radio, Telekom and Weiner-Szász orchestras. He has also performed in France, England, the Netherlands, Austria, Turkey, the United States and Russia in major concert halls such as London’s Wigmore Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Paris’ Salle Gaveau and Moscow’s Rachmaninov Hall.

As a chamber musician, he has performed with artists such as Valery Affanasyev, Konstantin Bogino, Zoltán Fejérvári, Ian Fountain, Erika Geldsetzer Keller András, Imre Rohmann, Aleksandar Madjar, Albert Markov, J.M.Philips-Varjabedian, Pavel Vernikov, Marine Yashvili, among others.

Christopher Elton was born in Edinburgh and received most of his musical education at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he achieved the unusual distinction of gaining the Academy’s highest performing award - the Dip. RAM - on both piano and ‘cello.
He was a prizewinner in several British and international piano competitions, playing and broadcasting regularly both as a soloist and in chamber music. At the same time he worked as a freelance ‘cellist with the major London orchestras.

Christopher Elton’s international recognition has come as a result of the many successes of his students at the Royal Academy of Music. Many have won international awards, including first prizes in the Van Cliburn, London “World” International Piano and “Top of the World” Competitions as well as in the 2014 Shenzen International Piano Competition and the 2014 Montreal International Piano Competition. Further recent successes include prizewinners in four recent Leeds International Piano Competition finals as well as in earlier Tchaikovsky, Leipzig Bach, Dublin, Shanghai and many other such competitons. Many of his students are now recording artists, including Freddy Kempf, Yevgeny Sudbin, Joanna MacGregor, Inon Barnatan and Benjamin Grosvenor.

While his priority is to his work at the Royal Academy, London, Christopher Elton has also been much in demand overseas both as a teacher and as a jury member for international competitions.

Within the last few years he has given masterclasses in the USA, Japan, Israel, Korea, Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Spain, Germany and Ireland and Vietnam. He has also been invited as a jury member at many important international competitions - Moscow (Tchaikovsky), Dublin, Leeds, Busoni (Bolzano),Vienna Beethoven, Shenzen and China International, Santander, etc.. In 2017 he was a jury member for the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, USA. During recent years he has also given recitals in the UK, USA, Ireland, Spain, Australia and Vietnam.

Christopher Elton was Head of Keyboard at the Royal Academy of Music, London, for 24 years, until 2011, when he left that position to focus on his teaching. He was elected a Fellow in 1983, In 2002 the title of Professor of the University of London was conferred on him.

In 2018 he also acted as Visiting Professor of Piano at the University of Yale.

Hilary Coates is one of the best-established and most respected piano teachers of specialist young musicians in the UK. She combines her teaching between her long-standing work with some of the most talented specialist young pianists at Wells Cathedral School and her post as Professor of Piano at Trinity College of Music, London. (This follows her period in a similar post at the Guildhall School of Music.)

Hilary’s professional debut was at the age of nineteen, performing the Grieg Concerto in the Royal Festival Hall on London’s Southbank.

She had already gained a full scholarship, age 16, to the Royal Academy of Music from which she graduated with the Academy’s top performance award – the Dip.RAM.
She then continued her studies with Ilona Kabos and Maria
Curcio. She was a prizewinner in the finals of the Alfredo Casella International Piano Competition in Naples, as well as in the BBC Manchester Piano Competition.

She was distinguished also by the “Musician of the Year” Award by the Greater London Arts Association.

She performed extensively for many years as concerto soloist, recitalist and chamber music player both in the UK and on overseas concert tours of France, Italy, South America and Germany.

Her activities now are largely focused on her teaching, and her UK students have had many successes and some have been outright winners in both the BBC Young Musician and the Audi Competitions.

In recent years her work has taken on a more international dimension with masterclasses at conservatoires and universities in Hong Kong, Australia, Vietnam and Ireland, and also at the Van Cliburn Institute in Fort Worth,
Texas. For many years she gave UK masterclasses for the Yamaha Music Foundation.

Contact email: hilarycoates@onetel.com

Gergely Devich grew up in a musician family, his mother Mária Kovalszki is a Liszt Prize-winning pianist. His extended family includes many musicians, including two grandparents, Katalin Durkó, pianist and music director, and János Devich, Liszt and Bartók-Pásztory Prize-winning cellist and distinguished artist.
He started playing the cello at the age of eight, and chose his instrument himself. He was taught by Zsuzsanna Antók at the Szent István Music School in Zugló, and at the age of 14 he was accepted into the preparatory section of the Academy of Music, in the special talents class of Professor László Mező. At the Liszt Academy of Music, he was taught by László Mező and István Varga, who graduated in 2022. His chamber music teachers were János Devich, Márta Gulyás, Péter Kováts and Miklós Perényi. He has participated in master classes with László Fenyő, Adrian Brendel, István Várdai, Oleg Kogan, Gustav Rivinius, Reinhard Latzko, Lluis Claret, György Pauk and Marko Ylönen.
He is a prize-winner of several national and international competitions. In 2014, he represented Hungary at the Eurovision Song Contest for Young Musicians in Cologne, where he came third, the best Hungarian performance ever. He was one of the winners of the Budapest Festival Orchestra's competition for music school students, and was able to perform with the ensemble.

In Legnago he won first prize at the Salieri International Music Competition.
As a soloist he performed under the baton of Zoltán Kocsis, Kenicsiró Kobajasi, Tamás Vásáry, András Keller, János Kovács, Gergely Madaras, Martin Rajna and Iván Fischer. At the age of 13, he was already soloist in Ernő Dohnányi's cello concerto at the Müpa Budapest, conducted by Kálmán Záborszky, with the Zugló Philharmonic Orchestra. He also performed Dohnányi's Konzertstück in November 2023 in the Great Hall of the Liszt Academy with the National Philharmonic Orchestra under Maxim Rysanov. He played at the opening gala concert of the renewed Liszt Academy and at the 30th anniversary concert of the Budapest Festival Orchestra, and was the main soloist at a concert of the Pastorale series of the Zugló Philharmonic Orchestra.
He is a member of the Korossy String Quartet and plays a lot with his mother, Maria Kovalszki, and his artist friends, including pianists Fülöp Ránki, Ádám Balogh, Mihály Berecz and Valentin Magyar, Éva Osztrosits, Csongor Korossy-Khayll, Kristóf Tóth, János Stark, László Nyári, Júlia Pusker on violin, Balázs Dolfin on cello, Míra Farkas on harp. Other performers have included Zoltán Kocsis, Nicolas Altstaedt, Maxim Vengerov, Maxim Rysanov, Nobuko Imai, Dénes Várjon, István Várdai, János Balázs, József Balog, Ernő Kállai, Vilmos Oláh, Andrea Vigh, Márta Gulyás, Márta Ábrahám, Haruka Nagao, Ágnes Langer, Szabolcs Zempléni, Lívia Duleba, Anastasia Razvaljajeva, Zsolt Fejérvári and the Pulzus String Quartet.

In the calendar year 2023, a series of four concerts was launched at the Budapest Music Center, together with pianist Fülöp Ránki and violinist János Mátyás Stark.
In 2015 and 2018 he gave solo recitals at the Liszt Academy, and in 2015 his first recording with Maria Kovalszki was released on Hungaroton (Adagio and Allegro). He has performed at the Bartók Spring Festival, Kaposfest, Cziffra Festival, Ars Sacra Festival, Kammerara.hu series, Altalena Festival in Telki, Bratislava Music Festival, Fasori Music Evenings at the Reformed Church in Fasori. He has given several chamber concerts and recorded for Bartók Radio.
He has performed as a soloist with the National Philharmonic Orchestra, Concerto Budapest, MÁV Symphony Orchestra, Zugló Philharmonic Orchestra, Debrecen Philharmonic Orchestra, Târgu Mures Philharmonic Orchestra, Győr Philharmonic Orchestra, Mendelssohn, Anima Musicae and Liszt Ferenc Chamber Orchestras. In Târgu Mureș, he performed Antonín Dvořák's Cello Concerto at the Palace of Culture.

At the beginning of 2020, he performed Robert Schumann's Gordon Concerto with the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Tamás Vásáry at the Liszt Academy. He was also a soloist in Ludwig van Beethoven's Trio Concerto on three occasions. First with Concerto Budapest, conducted by András Keller, partnered by Júlia Pusker and Ádám Balogh, and then with the National Philharmonic Orchestra in Martonvoy with Vilmos Szabadi and Zoltán Fejérvári, conducted by Tibor Bogányi. He also performed this work at the Müpa Budapest as a partner of Maxim Vengerov and Fülöp Ránki in a concert with the MÁV Symphony Orchestra conducted by Christoph Campestrini. In 2021 he performed at the Liszt Academy of Music in the MTVA New Year's Eve concert with János Kovács conducting. At the first Hungarian Classical Music Day, held in memory of Zoltán Kocsis, he performed the cello transcription of Bartók's Viola Concerto with the National Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Gergely Madaras. In February 2023, he gave a recital at the Kitara Concert Hall in Sapporo, and in March 2023, he performed Schumann's Cello Concerto in A minor with the Győr Philharmonic Orchestra under Nicolás Pasquet.

His string quartet, the Korossy Quartet, won first prize at the National Weiner Leó Chamber Music Competition in 2019, and since then the quartet has received numerous invitations to play at the Budapest Festival Academy, the chamber music festival Kammerara.hu, the Auer Festival in Veszprém, the Echo Summer Academy in Fehérvárcsurgo, and the Valley of Arts in Kapolcs. In 2020, the Korossy Quartet presented the winning entry in the composers' round of the Bartók World Competition and was invited to play at the Music Academy concert celebrating Péter Eötvös' 70th birthday. In 2021 and 2023, they gave full evening concerts in the Solti Hall of the Liszt Academy. The quartet was a finalist in the 2021 round of the Bartók World String Quartet Competition at the Music Academy and was awarded several special prizes by the jury. From 2022 they will study at the Reina Sofia University in Madrid with the legendary primarius of the Alban Berg String Quartet, Günter Pichler. In 2023, a season-long series of six concerts of all of Béla Bartók's string quartets will be performed over two years at the Budapest Music Center.
Gergely Devich has been awarded the Junior Prima Prize (2014) and the Cziffra Talent Award (2017). In 2011 he was named Zugló's Man of the Year. He also received the Concorde Award of the Friends of the Liszt Academy. As a scholarship holder, he was able to participate in several Wagner performances at the Bayreuth Festival and to play in chamber concerts in Bayreuth. In 2022, he was awarded the Annie Fischer Scholarship and, as a member of the Korossy Quartet, received the Zoltán Kocsis Prize for Chamber Music.

Gergely Devich - together with Fülöp Ránki - is one of the main actors in Eszter Petrovics' fiction documentary Our Kodály, which was released in 2020 and has received numerous film awards, and has been screened on M5 and in cinemas.

Born into a family of musicians, Balázs Dolfin started the cello at the age of 4. Within a few years he won two national and chamber music competitions in his native, Hungary. In 2010, at the age of 12, he was accepted for the Department for Exceptionally Gifted Students at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest and began his studies with Prof. László Mező. In the following years he won numerous awards and first prizes at international competitions in Austria, Italy and Croatia. In 2016 he was supported by the Bank of China Scholarship and multiple times by the Annie Fischer Scholarship of the Hungarian Government. In 2018/19 he had the opportunity to study in Germany with Prof. Gustav Rivinius. He received his Master's Diploma under Prof. Wen-Sinn Yang at the
University for Music and Performing Arts in Munich.
Balázs has given numerous recitals across Europe: in Paris, London, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands, as well as appeared in many renowned
Hungarian concert halls such as the Grand Hall of the Liszt Academy, the Palace of Arts, the Marble Hall of the Hungarian Radio, and the Béla Bartók Memorial House,
among others. In 2017 he was awarded the Junior Príma Award, the most prestigious award for Hungarian artists.
In 2021 he won first prize at the “Virtuoso & Belcanto” competition and was invited to perform several concerts in Italy the following year. For the 2022 season he joined the cello section of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and in the same year participated in the prestigious Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. In 2023 January he won 2nd prize at Leó Weiner Chamber music Competition as well as the Special Prize for the best Weiner interpretation.
In 2022-23, Balázs was one of the selected students at the University for Music and Performing Arts Munich to attend in the highest soloist degree in Europe, called “Meisterklasse Zertifikatstudium” with Prof. Wen-Sinn from which he has recently graduated with distinction. He performs regularly throughout Europe with his cello
and piano duo, the “Dolfin-Lin Duo”, which he founded in 2022 with his chamber music partner, Tony Chen Lin. The duo's most recent successful concert was in Brussels (Liszt Institute Brussels), which was also their debut concert in Belgium.