ANNA PAOLINA HASSLACHER - PIANO

Anna Paolina Hasslacher is an internationally active French pianist of Mexican descent. She develops her musical activity as a soloist, a chamber musician and in various free improvisation projects.
She studied piano in Mexico and Strasbourg and free improvisation in Basel.
Since 2013, she has created several experimental projects, including the audiovisual installation "¿Fluye el tiempo?", which was presented in France and Mexico. In numerous performances at international festivals she has worked with composers such as Helmut Lachenmann, Ivan Fedele, Beat Furrer, Mark Andre and Iradj Sahbaï. Pedagogy is an essential part of Anna Paolina's musical work, where she develops international projects in terms of workshops, conferences and educational concerts.
https://annapaolinahasslacher.com/

CAROLINA SARMIENTO - PIANO

Carolina Sarmiento grew up in Colombia and has lived in Switzerland for over 20 years, where she is now also a Swiss citizen.
She completed her piano studies in the USA at Johns Hopkins University with Julien Martin, in Austria at the University of Music Vienna and in Switzerland at the ZHdK with Homero Francesch and at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana with Nora Doallo, where she received her soloist diploma.
She is a passionate teacher of a piano class at the Zurich Conservatory (MKZ) and is involved as a jury member in various Swiss piano competitions.
As a pianist, Carolina Sarmiento regularly performs in solo concerts and in chamber music formations. Her repertoire includes both the classical and romantic piano literature of Europe as well as works by Latin American composers, which she would like to bring to the audience in order to build bridges between cultures and eras.

BILIANA VOUTCHKOVA - VIOLIN (FILM)

Biliana Voutchkova is a dynamic, thoroughly engaged interdisciplinary artist, violinist, composer-performer, improvisor and curator with highly individual, unconventional artistic language. Through the prism of listening, her early training in classical music and the years of development as contemporary artist-performer, she explores states of spontaneity and intuitive resonance embodied in her multifaceted activities. Her work spans the widest possible range of sound, vision, movement and includes concert performances of improvisation, contemporary composition and original site specific work, exhibitions, long durational / multidisciplinary performances, audiovisual works and installation formats with focus on the interconnection between inner world and sound space.
Biliana works internationally as a soloist and in collaboration with many renowned artists and ensembles (the Splitter and Trickster Orchestras and Ensemble Modern among others). She is the founder and curator of the DARA String Festival, faculty at the HKB Bern, SHAPE+ Platform artist for 2022/2023, co-founder and member of Voutchkova/ Thieke duo, Jane in Ether and the Land Stages Collective, and a recent recipient of the Berlin Residency Stipend at Cité des Arts / Paris, Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, the Composition Stipend from the Berliner Senate, grands from INM/Berlin, Musikfonds, the National Culture Fund/Bulgaria and the Trust for Mutual Understanding/New York.
www.bilianavoutchkova.net

MARC HAAS - CONDUCTOR

Marc Haas studied violin and viola in Strasbourg, and afterwards conducting with the conductor Ernst Schelle in Berlin.
In 1992 he founded the Hochberg music course (chamber music and orchestra), of which he was musical director until 2006. His particular commitment is to youth work, so he conducted the Strasbourg Juniors Orchestra from 2004 to 2011.
Since 2006 he has been the conductor of the Orchester Symphonique d'Haguenau, which was founded on his initiative.

DIEGO KOHN

Diego Kohn is a performer and composer whose work moves across free improvisation, contemporary music, and collective creation. His practice is driven by an exploratory approach to sound and a commitment to real-time encounter, shaped through collaborations with influential improvisers including Fred Frith, George Lewis, Malcolm Goldstein and Vinko Globokar.
Active across Europe and the Americas, he performs as a soloist and with experimental ensembles such as the Slide Ensemble (Zürich), the Insub Meta Orchestra (Geneva) and the Europa Meta Orchestra (Montpellier). His performances navigate acoustic and electronic sound worlds with a strong focus on timbre, gesture, and the poetics of improvisation.
Kohn also develops artistic projects that connect diverse musical and cultural contexts. He is the artistic director of Creaziun, a long-term initiative commissioning new works and fostering collaborative creation, and he created Listening Across the Borders, an intercultural project linking artists from Europe, Israel and the Arab world through practices of improvisation and critical listening.
Alongside his artistic work, Kohn teaches improvisation at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and is part of the postgraduate faculty at Instituto 17 (Mexico). He regularly offers workshops and masterclasses on improvisation and collective creation at international institutions such as the Sibelius Academy (Finland), the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre (EAMT), the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp (Belgium), the Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig (Germany), and the Universidad de las Artes (Argentina).
Originally from Argentina and now based in Switzerland, he continues to expand his performance practice through collaborations, residencies and festival appearances, cultivating improvisation as a dynamic space of experimentation, encounter and artistic risk.