Swiss composer and radio producer Conrad Beck was born on 16th June 1901 in Lohn, Schaffhausen. After short time of mechanical engineering studies at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich and private music lessons with Müller-Zürich, he started to attend the Zürich Conservatory, where he studied composition with Volkmar Andreae, counterpoint with Reinhold Laquai and piano with Carl Baldegger. He stayed in Paris between 1924 and 1933, where he studied with Jacques Ibert and socialise with the circle surrounding Arthur Honegger, Nadia Boulanger and Albert Roussel. At the suggestion of Swiss conductor Paul Sacher, who promoted his career more than any other composer, he settled down in Basel in 1934. During a period of over 50 years, Sacher commissioned his works and conducted their premieres with the Basel Chamber Orchestra and the Collegium Musicum Zürich. From 1939 to 1966 Beck worked as music director of Swiss Radio in Basel, a position that enabled him to do a great deal to promote contemporary music. His honours include the composition prize of the Schweizerischer Tonkünstlerverein (1954), the Ludwig Spohr Prize of the city of Brunswick (1956) and the Basle arts prize (1964). He is dying on 31st October 1989 in Basel.

   Italian composer Luciano Berio was born on 24th October 1925 in Oneglia, Italy into a family of musicians (his father Ernesto and his grandfather Adolfo were organists and composers). His career as pianist was interrupted by injury of his right hand on the first day he was conscripted into the army during World War II. He stayed in military hospital, before he fled to fight in resistance. After war he studied composition at the Milan Conservatory with Giulio Cesare Paribeni and Giorgio Federico Ghedini until 1951, when Berio went to the United States to study serial methods with Luigi Dallapiccola at Tanglewood. In 1950 he met young American student, singer Cathy Berberian who he married shortly after his graduation and they divorced in 1964. They had daughter, Christina (*1953).  After his trip to Tanglewood, Berio returned to Milano where he took on work for the Italian radio and television network (RAI). Work for RAI brought him to close contact and lasting friendship with Umberto Eco. In 1955, thanks to his interest in electronic music, Berio is co-founding with Bruno Maderna an electronic music studio in Milan called Studio di Fonologia. Many composers such as Henri Pousseur and John Cage worked there. He also produced an electronic music periodical, Incontri Musicali. Darmstadt summer schools (Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik), where he meets Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti and Mauricio Kagel. Berio is posted as Composer in residence in Tanglewood in 1960. Two years later is invited by Darius Milhaud to substitute for Milhaud at Mills College, Oakland, California. From 1965 till 1971 he teaches at the Juilliard School of Music. He is founding the Juilliard Ensemble, which was promoting contemporary music by performing. His students were Steve Reich, Luca Francesconi Louis Andriessen, Phil Lesh and others. In 1965 he is again married to philosopher Susan Oyama, who he divorced in 1972. They had daughter Marina (*1966) and son Stefano (*1968).  He is returning to Italy in 1972 and buying land and buildings at Radicondoli. Restoration, vineyards and fruit trees planting took over next two years. In 1975 he is moving in. In 1974-1980 is director of IRCAM electro-acoustic division in Paris. Collaboration with Pierre Boulez. He is married for the third time with Israeli musicologist Talia Pecker in 1977. Two sons were born from the marriage, Daniel (*1978) and Jonathan (*1980). Berio is opening Tempo Reale in Florence in 1987. Luciano Berio was awarded many honours and prizes. Honorary Doctorate from City University, London (1980), In 1988 he was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music in London, prestigious Siemens-Musikpreis (1989), Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University (1993-1994), Distinguished Composer in Residence at Harvard University (1994-2000), Honorary Doctorate from University of Siena (1995), Praemium Imperiale conferred by the Japan Art Association (1996), president of Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome (2000). Luciano Berio is dying 27th May 2003 in a hospital in Rome.

  English composer, conductor and pianist Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten of Aldeburgh [Lord Britten of Aldeburgh], was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk on 22 November 1913. He was the youngest of four children of Robert, a dentist and talented amateur musician and his wife Edith, a singer and pianist. He started to learn the piano and began to compose from the age of five; at ten he began viola lessons. In 1928 it was arranged for him to have lessons with the composer Frank Bridge. In 1930 Britten entered the Royal College of Music in London (he won a scholarship to the RCM), sharing a flat with his sister Beth and studying composition with John Ireland and piano with Arthur Benjamin. At the end of his second year at the RCM, Britten won the Cobbett Chamber Music Prize. In December 1932 Britten graduated and was awarded a £100 travel grant. Britten had also intended to study with Alban Berg in Vienna. In 1934 Britten's Phantasy Quartet was selected for performance at the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) Festival in Florence and his choral variations, A Boy was Born, written for the BBC Singers, were broadcast by the BBC. Britten's father died in April 1934. In October 1934 Britten and his mother travelled to Vienna. There he met the music editor Erwin Stein, who later came to England as a refugee and took a position in the music publishing house Boosey and Hawkes, where the director Ralph Hawkes had already signed Britten up as a composer. In 1935 he wrote a collection of Songs of Friday Afternoons, written for Friday afternoon music at the Clive House School, Prestatyn where Britten's brother, Robert, was headmaster. In April 1935 Britten started writing the film scores for series of documentary films showing aspects of English life (the King's Stamp, Coal Face, Night Mail, …) produced by the General Post Office  Film Unit. Here Britten collaborated with the poet W. H. Auden, who supplied the narrative for some of the films accompanied by Britten's music. In 1936 Britten attended the ISCM festival in Barcelona. Later the same year, when he was commissioned to write a work for the Norwich Festival, he used a text by Auden for the song cycle Our Hunting Fathers, about human's relation to animals, both attacking the fox-hunting set at home and acting as a parable for the emergence of Nazism abroad. He composed the music for the feature film Love from a Stranger, based on a short story by Agatha Christie and starring Ann Harding and Basil Rathbone. In January 1937 Britten's mother Edith Britten died of a heart attack. In 1937, he first met the tenor Peter Pears, with whom he entered into the lifelong personal and creative partnership that was to become a major inspiration for his music. He composed a Pacifist March with words by Ronald Duncan, for the Peace Pledge Union, of which, as a pacifist, he had become an active member. In 1939 he wrote an orchestral cantata, Ballad of Heroes, to words by Swingler and Auden in commemoration of the British members of the International Brigade, who fell fighting the fascists in Spain. Five months before the outbreak of World War Two, Britten and Pears sailed to North America and stayed there for three years. In September 1939 they wanted to return to England, but were told they would be more valuable if they stayed in the States and increased sympathy for Britain there. In the States Britten met Aaron Copland and composed the Sinfonia da Requiem (1940) in memory of his parents and commissioned to celebrate the 2600th Anniversary of the Founding of the Japanese Empire. It was, however, not performed at the Japanese celebrations. At last, in March 1942 the longed-for visas were obtained and Britten and Pears returned to England on the Swedish cargo ship Axel Johnson. During the voyage the ship's funnel caught fire and the rest of the convoy had to leave the ship to the mercy of an Atlantic dominated by Nazi submarines. Although exempt from military service, Britten and Pears were under obligation to support the war effort through the use of their musical abilities. This meant recital tours for the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) to many remote and sometimes dangerous places in addition to Britten's composing activities and Pears's involvement as a singer with the Sadler's Wells opera company. Later Britten and Yehudi Menuhin played for Holocaust survivors during a ten-day tour of Germany in July 1945. The importance of Britten and Pears in post-War British cultural life was enhanced by their involvement in the founding of the English Opera Group in 1946 and the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts in June 1948. One of Britten's best-known works is The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946), which was composed to accompany the educational film Instruments of the Orchestra produced by the British government. Britten and Pears's recital at the Leeds Festival (1953). Friendship with English actor, director and producer David Hemmings. In 1955 Britten and Pears, with their friends the Prince and Princess of Hesse and the Rhine, toured the East, including a visit to the island of Bali. The greatest success of Britten's career was the War Requiem, written for the 1962 consecration of the newly reconstructed Coventry Cathedral after its almost complete destruction during World War II. Britten developed close friendships with Russian musicians Dmitri Shostakovich, Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife Galina Vishnevskaya in the 1960s. This led to the Cello Sonata (1961), the Cello Symphony (1963), and three Cello suites suites for cello solo (1964, 1967, and 1971). The 1970 Aldeburgh Festival was marked by the attendance of the Queen. By 1973 Britten's health had deteriorated considerably. Work became increasingly difficult during 1976 and it was in this year that Britten wrote one of his last compositions, the Tema 'Sacher' that Rostropovich would play for the 70th birthday of Paul Sacher. Benjamin Britten received many awards and honours including the Companion of Honour in the Coronation Honours (1953), the Order of Merit (1965), UNESCO's International Rostrum of Composers 1961, Grammy Awards - Classical Album of the Year (1963), Grammy Awards - Best Classical Performance (1963), Grammy Awards - Best Classical Composition by a Contemporary Composer (1963), Sonning Award in Denmark (1967), BRIT Awards - Best Orchestral Album (1977), Grammy Hall of Fame Award (1998). In 1976, six months before his death, he was created Life Peer "Baron Britten of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk", the first composer ever to receive that honour from the Queen. He died in the arms of Peter Pears on 4 December 1976 in Aldeburgh.

   German composer and composition teacher Wolfgang Fortner, was born on 12th October 1907 in Leipzig. Thanks to his parents - singers, he started to learn the piano and the organ very early and began to compose when he was only nine years old. He studied at the Leipzig Conservatory composition (with Hermann Grabner), the organ (with Karl Straube) and at the Leipzig University musicology (with Theodor Kroyer), German studies (with Hermann August Korff) and philosophy with (Hans Driesch). His early compositions were already officially performed during his studies. He taught at the Heidelberg Church Music Institute, as appointed lecturer, composition and music theory (1931–54), the North-West German Music Academy in Detmold (1954–7) and the Freiburg Musikhochschule (from 1957). In 1935 he founded the Heidelberg Chamber Orchestra to support New Music. In 1946, together with Wolfgang Steinecke, he started Darmstadt summer courses. Fortner's reputation as one of the leading composition teacher cannot be overlooked, he influenced whole generation of young composers from the 1950s to the 1970s. His students including Arthur Dangel, Diego H. Feinstein, Hans Werner Henze, Milko Kelemen, Arghyris Kounadis, Ton de Kruyf, Bruce MacCrombie, Roland Moser, Diether de la Motte, Nam June Paik, Graciela Paraskevaídis, Mauricio Rosenmann, Dieter Schönbach, Manfred Stahnke, Peter Westergaard, Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Heinz Werner Zimmermann. Fortner was a member of various cultural-political bodies: the Berlin Academy of Arts from 1955, the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts from 1956, president of the German section of the ISCM (1957–71), president of the Dramatists' Union in 1975 and artistic director of Musica Viva in Munich (1964–78). He received various prestigious awards include the Schreker-Prize Berlin (1948), the Brunswick Spohr prize (1953), the North Rhine-Westphalia Grand Art Prize (1955), the Hamburg Bach prize (1960), the Freiburg Reinhold Schneider prize and the Gold Pin of the Dramatists' Union in 1977. On his 70th birthday he was awarded the "Grosses Verdienstkreuz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland" and Honorary Doctorate of the Universities of Heidelberg and Freiburg. He died on 5th September 1987 in Heidelberg.

  Argentinean composer Alberto Evaristo Ginastera, was born, to Argentine parents of Catalan and Italian descents, on 11th April 1916 in Buenos Aires. He studied at the National Conservatory of Music in Buenos Aires, graduated in 1938. His career as a teacher began in 1941 at the National Conservatory and the San Martín National Military Academy. The same year he married Mercedes de Toro, with whom he had two children. Because of signing a petition in support of civil liberties, he was in 1945 forced by the Perónist regime to resign from the National Military Academy. He collected the Guggenheim grant he received in 1942, and went to the USA with his family, where he stayed from 1945 till 1947 and studied with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood. When he returned to Buenos Aires he co-founded the Argentine section of the ISCM as well as the Conservatory of music and theatre arts at the National University of La Plata he become a director. In 1951 the ISCM selected his work to be presented its 25th festival in Frankfurt. It was Ginastera's first visit to Europe, where he participated in International Music Council of UNESCO meetings as well. More visits ISCM followed in Oslo (1953), Stockholm (1956), Rome (1959) and Madrid (1965). In 1952 Perón government forced him to resign his directorship at the Conservatory at La Plata until 1956, when Perón's regime defeated. He supported himself by composing film music, mainly in 1942-1958. In 1958 he was granted full professorship at La Plata, he resigned it the same year when asked to manage and direct the Faculty of musical arts and sciences at the Catholic University of Argentina as dean in 1958-1963. He resigned all university posts in 1963 and devote his full attention to composing and to directing of the Latin American Centre for Advanced Musical Studies at the Instituto Torcuato di Tella. Under his leadership (1963-1971) the Instituto Torcuato di Tella promoted avant-garde techniques by offering Latin American composers two years fellowships to study with Copland, Messiaen, Xenakis, Nono and Dallapiccola. In 1968 Ginastera moved back to the United States and from 1970 he lived in Europe. In 1971 he married Argentine cellist Aurora Nátola settling permanently in Switzerland and devoting his time entirely to composition. He is considered as one of the most important Latin American classical composers. Among his students were Astor Piazzolla, Waldo de los Ríos and Rafael Aponte-Ledée. He was a member of the National Academy of Fine Arts of Argentina (1957), the Brazilian Academy of Music (1958), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1965) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1968). He received honorary doctorates from Yale (1968) and Temple University (1975). He was awarded the grand prize of the Argentine National Endowment for the Arts in 1971 and the UNESCO International Music Council music prize in 1981. He died on 25th June 1983 in Geneva.

   Swiss composer, oboist, conductor and pianist Heinz Holliger was born in Langenthal, in the canton of Berne, on 21st May 1939. While attending the Gymnasium in Burgdorf he studied the oboe with Émile Cassagnaud (1950 - 1958), the piano with Sava Savoff (1955 - 1958) and composition with Sándor Veress (1956 - 1960) in Berne. In Paris he studied the oboe with Pierre Pierlot and the piano with Yvonne Lefébure (1958 - 1959), and had composition lessons with Pierre Boulez at the Basle Academy (1961 - 1963). Holliger won competitions at Geneva (1959) and Munich (1961), he was a principal oboist in the Basle Orchestra (1959 - 1964). One of the leading wind virtuosos of his time, he has had works written for him by L. Berio, E. Carter, B. Ferneyhough, H. W. Henze, K. Huber, E. Krenek, G. Ligeti, W. Lutoslawski, K. Penderecki, K. Stockhausen and T. Takemitsu. Since 1965 he has taught the oboe at the Staatliche Musikhochschule of Freiburg. From the mid-1970s Holliger has become increasingly prominent as a conductor, making his first appearances as guest conductor with Paul Sacher's Basle Chamber Orchestra. His own compositions show a fascination with extreme psychological and musical situations. He is often inspired by the poetry of David Rokeah, Robert Walser, Friedrich Hölderlin and plays by Samuel Beckett. His most quoted works is Cardiophonie (1971), which uses the sounds of player own heart, picked up by a contact microphone. He was composer-in-residence with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande (1993 - 1994) and at the Lucerne Festival (1998). He is married to harpist Ursula Holliger. His honours include the composition prize of the Schweizerischer Tonkünstlerverein (1985), the Sonning-Preis (1987), the Frankfurt Music Prize (1988), the City of Basle Art Prize (1989), the Ernst von Siemens Musikpreis (1991) and an honorary doctorate from Zürich University (1998).

   Swiss composer Klaus Huber was born in Bern on 30th November 1924. He attended a grammar school in Basel and completed a teacher training course in Küsnacht/Zürich. He studied violin with Stefi Geyer (1947-1949) and theory and composition with his godfather Willy Burkhard (1947-1955) at the Conservatory in Zürich where he also taught violin from 1950-1960. Huber continued his studies at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Berlin with Boris Blacher (1955-1956). In 1955 his work was performed at the International Gaudeamus music week in Bilthoven in the Netherlands. Later in 1959 he was awarded the first prize for chamber music in the composition competition of the Italian ISCM section during the World Music Days of the IGNM in Rome. Huber took up a teaching post in musical history at the Conservatory in Lucerne (1960-1963). His composition appeared at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt. In 1961-1972 he taught at the Academy of Music in Basel, where from 1964, he was the director of the composition and instrumentation classes and from 1968 director of the master-class in composition. Huber was a member of the international jury of the ISCM World Music Days (1965, 1969, 1987) and director of the analysis courses and seminars at the international composition competitions of the Gaudeamus foundation in Bilthoven in the Netherlands (1966, 1968, 1972). In spring 1968, the Soviet Composers Association, invited him to the Soviet Union (Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev). In 1969 Huber founded the International Composers' Seminar in the Künstlerhaus Boswil in Switzerland. In 1973 he won a scholarship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) in Berlin. Huber became successor to Wolfgang Fortner at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg as director of the composer class and of the Institute for contemporary music. From 1979 to 1982 he is president of the Swiss Composers' Association. In 1983 Huber travelled for the first time to Nicaragua where he met with Ernesto Cardenal and gave lectures in La Habana in Cuba. One year later he gave lectures on  "Cursos latinoamericanos por la musica contemporanea" in Tatui in Brasilia. He made a second journey to Nicaragua where he lectured at the Escuela Nacional de Musica in Managua. He was a guest professor at the McGill University in Montreal in Canada and guest professor at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. In 1986 he gave lectures at the universities of Tokyo, Nagoya and Hiroshima in Japan. He was a guest professor at the IRCAM, Paris (1986, 1988, 1990, 1993) and at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique, Paris (1987, 1989, 1992). Huber taught at the Summer seminar for young composers at Radziejowice in Poland (1987) and gave composition seminars and lectures at the conservatories in Malmö and Stockholm (1989). In 1990 Huber resigned from teaching at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg and continued giving masterclasses at Luzern/Boswil (1994), the composition seminar at Schloss Schielleiten in Graz (1994) and masterclasses at the Hochschule für Künste in Bremen (1997). He was guest professor at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki (1990), at the Royal Academy of Music in London (1991), at the Conservatoire de Musique in Genève (1991), at the Brandenburgisches Kolloquium Neue Musik in Berlin (1991), at the Scuola Civica di Musica in Milano (1992-1993), at Winterthur, Viitasari and the Akiyoshidai Festival in Japan (1995), at the Lyon Conservatoire (1996), Aristoxenos-Masterclass in Aigion in Greece (1996), at the Sarajevo Conservatoire (1997), at the Grieg Academy in Bergen (1998) and at the University of Alcalà in Spain (1998). Huber was composer in residence at the Academy of Music in Basel (1992), at the festival "Musica" in Strasbourg (1992), at the Huddersfield Festival (1992), at the Centre Acanthes, Villeneuve lez Avignon (1993), at the New Music Concerts in Toronto (1993), at the Internationale Musikfestwochen in Luzern (1994); at Winterthur, Viitasari and the Akiyoshidai Festival in Japan (1995), in Caracas (1997) and at the Bergen Festival (1998). In 1998 he founded the concert series "Musica insieme Panicale" in Umbria. Recently his work was performed at the Lucerne Festival, the Festival Musica in Strasbourg and the Warsaw Autumn Festival. Huber is a socially and politically conscious composer and his music often conveys a humanistic message. Since 1975 his works have been published by Ricordi Editions in Munich. The autographs are available in the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. He is author of various writings, such as "Umgepflügte Zeit" (Cologne, 1999), "Unterbrochene Zeichen - Klaus Huber" (Saarbrücken, 2005) and "Klaus Huber: Von Zeit zu Zeit, Das Gesamtschaffen" (2009). Klaus Huber is member of the "Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste", of the "Akademie der Künste Berlin" and of the "Freie Akademie der Künste Mannheim", honorary member of the ISCM as well as honorary doctor of the University of Strasbourg. His awards and prizes include Beethovenpreis of the city of Bonn (1970), Prize of the Swiss Composers (1975), Artprize of the city of Basel (1978), Reinhold-Schneider-Prize of the city of Freiburg (1985), Premio Italia (1986), the European Church Music Prize by the city of Schwäbisch Gmünd (2009), Music Prize Salzburg (2009) and Ernst von Siemens-Musikpreis (2009). He lived in Bremen and Panicale in Perugia in Italy. Hi died on 2nd October 2017 in Perugia.

  Polish composer and conductor Witold Lutosławski was born, to politically and culturally active family, on 25th January 1913 in Warsaw. In September 1918, when Lutosławski was five, father Jósef Lutosławski and uncle Marian Lutosławski were executed by Bolsheviks firing squad in Butyrskaja prison in Moscow, just few days before their planned trial. After the World War I., rest of the family returned to new independent Poland. Lutosławski started to learn play piano when he was six years old. He further studied at the Warsaw Conservatory, graduated in 1936 with piano diploma and in 1937 with diploma for composition. Signalling and radio operating at the Military service followed. His plans to continue with musical studies in Paris were interrupted by German and Russian invasion of Poland, when Lutosławski was mobilised with the Krakow radio unit, soon captured by German soldiers. He managed to escape being marched to prison camp and walked 400 km to Warsaw. His brother was captured by Russian soldiers, and later died in a Siberian labour camp. To earn a living, Lutosławski joined a cabaret group playing popular dances. He also formed a piano duo with friend and composer Andrzej Panufnik, and they performed together in Warsaw cafés. In German occupied Warsaw, listening in cafés was the only access to live music. In café Aria, where they played, Lutosławski met his future wife Maria Danuta Bogusławska, a sister of the writer Stanisław Dygat. Lutosławski left Warsaw with his mother a few days before the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, salvaging only a few scores and sketches the rest of his music was lost during the destruction of the city. Lutosławski returned to the ruins of Warsaw after the Polish-Soviet treaty in April 1944. In 1945, Lutosławski was elected as secretary and treasurer of the newly constituted Union of Polish Composers (ZKP - Związek Kompozytorów Polskich). In 1946, he married Maria Danuta Bogusławska. Because he was implacably opposed to the ideas of Socialist realism, in 1948 he was dropped from the ZKP committee, following Stalin's artistic censorship. His First Symphony was proscribed as "formalist", and he found himself shunned by the Soviet authorities, a situation that continued throughout the era of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. In 1954, the climate of musical oppression drove his friend Andrzej Panufnik to defect to the United Kingdom. Stalin's death in 1953 allowed a certain relaxation of the cultural totalitarianism in Russia and its satellite states. In 1954 Lutosławski received, much to the composer's humiliation, the Prime Minister's Prize, for a set of children's songs. Following four years is Lutosławski working on his Music of mourning (1958), which was written to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the death of Béla Bartók, this work brought international recognition, the annual ZKP prize and the UNESCO prize (1959). In years 1957-1963 Lutosławski composed waltzes, foxtrots and tangos under the pseudonym Derwid. First commission from abroad (Zagreb music biennale, 1963) earned him another State Prize for music and agreement with music publishing house Chester music. Following performances of his work in Sweden (1965) and at the Aldeburgh Festival, founded by British composer and friend Benjamin Britten. Cooperation with Pierre Boulez who conducted his work. In 1967 Lutosławski received Denmark's highest musical honour the Sonning Award (1967), followed by first prize from the UNESCO's Tribune internationale des compositeur (1968). Creation of his Cello Concerto (1968 - 1970), premiered by Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, was deeply affected by the death of Lutosławski's mother in 1967 and by suppression of liberal political activities. In 1981-1989 Lutosławski refused all professional engagements in Poland as gesture of solidarity boycotted artists. In 1983, as a gesture of support, he sent a recording of the first performance of the Third Symphony to Gdańsk to be played to strikers in a local church. He was awarded the Solidarity prize (1983) and the first Grawemeyer Prize from the University of Louisville, Kentucky (1985), that allowed him to set up a scholarship enable young Polish composers to study abroad. In 1987 he was awarded with the Royal Philharmonic Society's Gold Medal and major celebration of his work was made at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (1987). In addition, he was awarded honorary doctorates at several universities worldwide, including Cambridge. After substantive talks had been arranged between the government and the opposition, Lutosławski returns to the conductor's podium in Poland at the Warsaw Autumn Festival (1988). Following events in 1989, Lutosławski took on the presidency of the newly reconstituted "Polish Cultural Council". In 1993 Lutosławski travelled to the United States, England, Finland, Germany, Canada and Japan. He had been awarded Poland's highest honour, the Order of the White Eagle. Hi died on 7th February 1994. His wife Danuta died shortly afterwards.

  Swiss conductor and patron of the arts Paul Sacher was born on 28th April 1906 in Basel. In 1925 he started to study conducting with Felix Weingartner and Moser at the Basel Conservatory, and musicology with Karl Nef and Jacques Handschin at the University of Basel. In 1926 he founded the Basel Chamber Orchestra (Basler Kammerorchester, BKO), to which the affiliated Basel Chamber Choir was added in 1928. A year later Sacher became a board member and artistic director of the Basel chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). In 1931 he was appointed to the board of directors of the Swiss Association of Musicians and in 1933 he established the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel and became its first director. In 1934 he married Maja Hoffmann-Stehlin, the widow of Emanuel Hoffmann. Through his marriage, Sacher became a member of the board of the Hoffmann-La Roche pharmaceutical empire. In 1936 Sacher commissioned his first work from Béla Bartók: Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. He became conductor of the newly formed Collegium Musicum Zürich in 1941, and he led it for more than 50 years. In 1941 he became the founder and artistic director of the Collegium Musicum Zurich (CMZ) and in 1946 he became president of the Swiss Association of Musicians. In 1954 Sacher joined the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis with both the Conservatory and Musikschule to create the Musikakademie der Stadt Basel. He served as the Musikakademie's first director till 1969. He was appointed honorary president of the Swiss Association of Musicians in 1955; five years later he established a master-class in composition at the Academy of Music and obtained Pierre Boulez as its teacher. As a guest conductor, Sacher regularly performed in the most important festivals and music centres in Europe, America, Japan and Australia, including festivals in Glyndebourne, Edinburgh, Lucerne and Aix-en-Provence, cooperating with names such as Pablo Casals, Dinu Lipati and Mstislav Rostropovich. In 1973 the Paul Sacher Foundation was founded, which in 1983, purchased the entire Stravinsky archive, followed by collections of Anton Webern, Bruno Maderna, Witold Lutosławski, Gyorgy Ligeti and Pierre Boulez. The Foundation officially opened in 1986 with an exhibition on "Twentieth-Century Music at the Paul Sacher Foundation". The Paul Sacher Foundation currently holds one of the world's major collections of classical and modern music. For his 70th birthday, 12 composers (Beck, Berio, Boulez, Britten, Dutilleux, Fortner, Ginastera, Halffter, Henze, Holliger, Huber and Lutosławski) wrote new "eSACHERe" works in his honour. A collection of his writings, Reden und Aufsätze, was published in Zürich in 1986. In 1987, after 61/59 years under Sacher's leadership, the final concert of the BKO and the Basel Chamber Chorus was held. In 1996 Sacher retired but still found the time and energy to help set up the Museum Jean Tinguely in Basel. As a tireless propagator of 20th-century music, Sacher commissioned over 200 works from many well known composers, including Béla Bartók, Luciano Berio, Harrison Birtwistle, Elliott Carter, Henri Dutilleux, Cristóbal Halffter, Hans Werner Henze, Paul Hindemith, Heinz Holliger, Arthur Honegger, Jacques Ibert, Ernst Krenek, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Frank Martin, Bohuslav Martinů, Wolfgang Rihm, Igor Stravinsky and Richard Strauss, often conducting the premières himself. In the 1990s he was named the world's third richest man. Paul Sacher died on 26 May 1999 in Basel.

  Russian (naturalized Swiss) cellist, conductor and pianist Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich was born on 27 March 1927, in Baku in Azerbaijan USSR, to ethnic Russian parents, who moved there from Orenburg. At age of four he learned the piano with his mother, Sofiya Nikolaevna Fedotova, a talented pianist. He started the cello at the age of 10 with his father, who was also a renowned cellist and former student of Pablo Casals. During World War II his family moved back to Orenburg and then in 1943 to Moscow. In 1943 he entered the Moscow Conservatory where he studied the cello, piano, conducting and composition, until 1948. Among his teachers were Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev. In protest to the 10 February 1948 decree, on "formalist" composers (his teacher Dmitri Shostakovich was dismissed from his professorships in Leningrad and Moscow), Rostropovich quit the Conservatory. In 1945 he won the gold medal in the first ever Soviet Union competition for young musicians. He won first prize at the international Music Awards of Prague in 1950. In 1950 he was awarded, what was then considered the highest distinction in the Soviet Union, the Stalin Prize. He is teaching at the Leningrad (Saint-Petersburg) Conservatory and the Moscow Conservatory. In 1952 he meets in Prague legendary conductor Václav Talich. In 1955, he married Galina Vishnevskaya, soprano at the Bolshoi Theatre. They had two daughters Olga and Jelena. He became professor of cello at the Moscow Conservatory in 1956 and at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1961. Rostropovich went on several tours in Western Europe and met several composers, including Benjamin Britten (1960). In 1970 Rostropovich wrote open letter to Soviet press in support of the proscribed novelist and Nobel prizewinner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and in protest at new Soviet restrictions on cultural freedom. His friendship with Solzhenitsyn and his support for dissidents led to official disgrace. Rostropovich and his wife Galina Vishnevskaya were denied exit from USSR and banned from TV and radio. He was sent on a recital tour of small towns in Siberia. In 1974 he was allowed to leave USSR with his family for a two years stay in Britain. Hi did not return and settled in the United States, where he later become American citizen. In 1978 they were deprived of Soviet citizenship for "acts harmful to the prestige of the USSR". His Russian citizenship restored in 1990 following the break-up of the Soviet Union. From 1977 until 1994, he was musical director and conductor of the U.S. National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, DC, while still performing with some of the most famous musicians such as Sviatoslav Richter and Vladimir Horowitz. He was also the director and founder of the Rostropovich Music Festival and was a regular performer at the Aldeburgh Festival in the UK. In a gesture of political thanksgiving he played Bach on site at the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and in 1991 flew to Moscow to show support for Boris Yeltsin, then besieged in the Russian government building. He and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, started the Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya Foundation to stimulate social projects and activities. They funded a vaccination program in Azerbaijan. In 2002 Rostropovich Home Museum is opened in Baku. In 2006, he was featured in Alexander Sokurov's documentary Elegy of a life: Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya. Rostropovich either commissioned or was the recipient of compositions by many composers including Conrad Beck, Luciano Berio, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Bliss, Pierre Boulez, Benjamin Britten, Henri Dutilleux, Wolfgang Fortner, Alberto Ginastera, Lopes Graça, Sofia Gubaidulina, Cristóbal Halffter, Hans Werner Henze, Heinz Holliger, Klaus Huber, Aram Khachaturian, Witold Lutosławski, Olivier Messiaen, Krzysztof Penderecki, Astor Piazzolla, Sergei Prokofiev, Alfred Schnittke and Dmitri Shostakovich. Rostropovich received many international awards and honorary doctorates from many international universities. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society (1970), Annual Award of the International League of Human Rights (1974), honorary degree of MusD from Cambridge University (1975), the Sonning Award (1981), the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance (1984), Honor Award of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Honorary KBE from Queen Elizabeth II (1987), the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan (1987), Citizen of Honor of Orenburg (1993), Polar Music Prize (1995), Prince of Asturias Awards (1997), honorary doctorate from Charles University (1998), Citizen of honor of Vilnius (2000), Order of Service to the Fatherland, First Degree, for his "outstanding contribution to the development of world music and many years of creative activity," presented by President Vladimir Putin (2007), Medal for Art and Science presented by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, the French Legion of Honor. He was an activist, fighting for human rights and freedom of expression in art and politics. As the ambassador for the UNESCO, he supported many educational and cultural projects. He maintained residences in Moscow, St. Petersburg, London, Paris, Lausanne and Jordanville, New York. He performed on various instruments including the Duport Stradivarius of 1711, a Storioni and a Peter Guarneri of Venice. Mstislav Rostropovich died on April 27, 2007 in Moscow.

  Czech Cellist František Brikcius chose to dedicate his life to the interpretation of cello compositions written by composers of the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, with special consideration given to compositions for cello solo. He also allows himself time to concentrate on works by Czech, Terezín and contemporary composers. František Brikcius plays a "George Kriwalski" cello made in 1904. Together with his sister Anna Brikcius, he is founder member of the "Duo Brikcius". Music cooperation with Talich chamber orchestra, pianist Tomáš Víšek, composer Irena Kosíková and conductor Jan Talich. Concert tours "Brikcius Cello Tour 2007", "Weinberger Tour" and "Duo Brikcius - 2 Cellos Tour" in Algeria, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czech republic, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden and the United Kingdom. More information about František Brikcius and his projects ("Prague - Brno: 6 Contemporary composers for cello solo in the interpretation of František Brikcius", "Tartini's L'Arte dell'Arco in the interpretation of František Brikcius", "7 Candles", "Weinberger Tour", "Duo Brikcius - 2 Cellos Tour", "MAKANNA" & "eSACHERe") is available on websites http://www.Brikcius.com .

  Jan Talich studied at the Prague Conservatory and later at the Prague Academy of Music under Václav Snítil. He received scholarships to further his education in both the USA with Shmuel Ashkenasi and then with Yfrah Neaman at the Guildhall School of Music in England. In 1989 he won 1st prize at the Václav Huml International Violin Competition in Zagreb, which launched his international solo career, playing with orchestras and giving recitals throughout Europe and the USA. Jan Talich has recorded several solo CDs of Czech music, as well as Beethoven and Mozart concertos. He regularly gives masterclasses both at home and abroad: in Telč, Dijon, Angers, Prades and the Conservatoire Superieur in Paris. With the Talich Quartet he has performed to great acclaim, regularly touring the major venues of Japan, South America, Mexico and South Korea. As well as conducting his own orchestra since its foundation he has, in the last few years, begun to broaden his career as a conductor. He is now increasingly asked to work as a guest conductor with many other orchestras in the Czech Republic and abroad. Since 2008/09 he has been chief conductor of Jihočeská komorní filharmonie. Jan Talich plays violins J. Gagliana 1780 and A. Stradivarius 1729. Visit http://www.Talich.com .