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Dr Yannis Rammos is a research associate in music theory at the EPFL Digital & Cognitive Musicology Lab, and member of the piano faculty at European University Cyprus. An internationally active piano pedagogue trained in Russia, in 2022/23 he led classes at the Verbier Festival Academy, the Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität für Musik, the Estonian Academy for Music & Theater, and Conservatorium van Amsterdam, among other venues. His research is motivated by technical, interpretive, and philosophical aspects of classical musical artistry, focusing on the fissure between structure and expression, anxieties of “authenticity” and “originality,” topics in piano timbre semantics, the use and disuse of music-analytical metaphors in (historical) performance treatises, and Russian musicological discourses. In most cases it engages traditions of linearity, including but not limited to Schenker’s, from various structuralist and post-structuralist perspectives. Formerly based at the Sibelius Academy, he completed his doctoral studies in piano and music theory at the CUNY Graduate Center and New York University, graduating from the latter with a Ph.D. in classical performance. Recent publications have appeared in Music & Letters, Quodlibet, and Music Theory & Analysis. He is winner of a Fulbright fellowship in piano. At EPFL he is currently working on a formal model of hidden (‘middleground’) motivic repetition, one of the most elusive, yet startling, features of the tonal canon.
Maximilian Maisky, born in 2004, is a Belgian-Italian pianist. He started playing piano at the age of 4 with Lyl Tiempo, and for several years he was a student of Hagit Hassid-Kerbel. At the age of 13 he became one of the first students of the newly opened Musica Mundi School in Waterloo, Belgium where he continued to study with Hagit Hassid-Kerbel and took regular masterclasses with Jacques Rouvier. He performed numerous times around Belgium with the school, both chamber music and solo pieces, and he enjoyed participating regularly in the Musica Mundi Course and Festival during the summer. Maximilian regularly performs with his father, Mischa Maisky, and his older sister, Lily Maisky. In 2022 October, he made his debut in Japan, playing at the Suntory Hall with his father. In 2023, he made his debut at the Philharmonie of Berlin. As of September 2023, Maximilian is an undergraduate RCM Scholar at the Royal College of Music under Prof. Dmitri Alexeev and Prof. Vitaly Pisarenko.
Nour Ayadi began her piano studies at age six in Morocco and later attended the Ecole Normale and Conservatoire de Paris, earning her Artist Diploma. She is an Artist-in-Residence at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel and studied with Nelson Goerner at the Haute Ecole de Musique de Genève. Her accolades include the Prix Cortot and a nomination at the Victoires de la Musique. Alongside her musical career, Nour earned a Master in Public Policy from Sciences Po Paris. She has performed at major international festivals and collaborated with conductors Christophe Koncz, Augustin Dumay, and Mikko Franck, as well as musicians Gautier Capuçon and the Ebène Quartet. Upcoming engagements include the Philharmonie de Paris and Victoria Hall. She also participated in the Maria João Pires Academy. Nour’s second album with Scala Music received 5 stars from Classica and 3T from Télérama.
Xinran Shi began playing the piano at age 4 and currently studies with Hans Boepple. At 13, she made her debut with the Hilton Head Symphony Orchestra, playing Chopin’s E-minor concerto. Xinran has attended various music festivals, including Morningside Music Bridge in Boston, the Cliburn International Junior Piano Competition & Festival, and Philadelphia Young Pianists’ Academy (PYPA) Piano Festival. She has won several piano competitions, including top prizes in the e-Piano Competition, Hilton Head International Piano Competition, and Ettlingen International Piano Competition. She was also a 2020–2022 Young Scholar of the Lang Lang International Music Foundation. In 2023, she appeared on NPR’s From The Top. Apart from music, she enjoys dancing, reading, swimming, and traveling.
Angel S. Wang is a student at the Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory, studying under Professor Natalia Trull. He recently achieved Second Prize and Silver Medal at the XVII International Tchaikovsky Competition, along with winning other international competitions such as the 63rd International Piano Competition ‘Premio Jaen’, the International Rachmaninoff Piano Competition, and the 21st International Piano Competition ‘Composers of Spain’. Angel has performed with orchestras including the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, under conductors like Valery Gergiev and Alexey Rubin. He has performed at important venues around the world, including Carnegie Hall, Musikverein, and in Moscow at both halls of the Moscow Conservatory, at the Mariinsky 2, and at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall.
Maya Oganyan was born in Moscow and has lived and studied in Venice since 2011. She began studying the piano at age of 4 with Alexander Maykapar, professor at the Gnessin Music Academy in Moscow. In 2015 she entered the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory in Venice, where she studied under the guidance of Massimo Somenzi. She has continued studies since 2022 in the class of Olaf John Laneri. The union of the Russian and Italian school are the key to Maya’s reading and interpretation of her repertoire. She is the winner of numerous national and international competitions and performs regularly as a soloist, chamber musician and with orchestras at important festivals.
Born in Moscow in 2003, Ekaterina Bonyushkina received her first piano lessons at the age of six. She has been
performing regularly as a soloist and in various chamber music formations since 2012.
In April 2014, at the age of 10, she won first prize at the 2nd International Youth Music Competition “CRESCENDO.GENEVE” in Geneva. A few weeks later, she played her first piano recital in Zürich. In the following years, she won prizes at multiple international competitions, notably, Jeune Chopin” competition in Valais, Geneva International Junior Piano Competition, Concours d’interprétation Musicale de Lausanne, the Grand Piano Competition in Moscow.
Ekaterina has performed with various orchestras: “Musica Viva Chamber Orchestra”, Ulyanovsk Symphony Orchestra, Ural Symphony Youth Orchestra, Svetlanov State Symphony Orchestra.
Her repertoire includes piano concertos by Tchaikovsky (No.1), Brahms (No.1,2), Beethoven (No.3,4,5), Rachmaninov (No.3), Saint-Saëns (No.2), Schumann, and others.
Ekaterina has been a guest in a number of international festivals: “Herbst in der Helferei”, where she performed as a soloist, with the festival orchestra, and in a duo with Gilad Karni (2015), Yuri Bashmet’s festival “Elba, Isola Musicale d’Europa” (2017), where she also received the “Prize of the year-2019”, Boris Berezovsky’s Festival in Tatarstan, Elabuga (2021), “Jeune Chopin” Festival in Cannes (2021), International A. Scriabin Festival in Moscow,(2022), “Aisa and friends” in Belgrade (2022), Puplinge Classique (2023) and “Primeurs musicales” in Geneva (2024).
In July 2024, Ekaterina was invited to take part in Verbier Festival’s Academy for emerging soloists, where she attended solo piano and chamber music masterclasses of J. Achucarro, K. Gerstein, N. Namoradze, A. Keller, and G. Takács-Nagy. She was there awarded the Tabor Foundation Award.
Apart from Verbier, at different times she has worked with Prof. Hamish Milne, Esther Yellin, Rena Shereshevskaya, Janina Fialkowska, Zlata Chochieva, Philippe Cassard.
Since 2014 Ekaterina has studied piano at the “Moscow Special Music School of Gnessin” with Evgeny Talisman and Boris Berezovsky. In September 2022, she enrolled at the Haute école de musique de Genève to complete the Bachelor piano course with Professor Nelson Goerner.
Chinese pianist Victor Yuanhan Lu studied with Yang Yang at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music and now trains with Alexander Schimpf at the University for Music, Drama and Media Hannover. Supported by the Fondation Gautier Capuçon, he has participated in competitions including the Geneva International Competition (2022) and the International Bach Leipzig Competition (2022), where he had the distinction of being the youngest semifinalist. He has performed at Schloss Elmau, and Boston’s Jordan and Williams Hall, all as a Fondation Gautier Capuçon laureate.