HENDRIK HOFMEYR, who has been described as South Africa’s most performed composer of Classical music, was born in Cape Town in 1957. He achieved his first major success as a composer in 1988 with the performance at the State Theatre of The Fall of the House of Usher, which won the South African Opera Competition Competition and the Nederburg Opera Prize. In the same year, Hofmeyr, who was furthering his studies in Italy during ten years of self-imposed political exile, obtained first prize in an international competition in Trent with music for a short film by Wim Wenders. In 1992 he was appointed lecturer at the University of Stellenbosch, and in 1997 won two

further international competitions, the Queen Elisabeth Competition of Belgium (with Raptus for violin and orchestra) and the Dimitri Mitropoulos Competition in Athens (with Byzantium for high voice and orchestra). Until his retirement at the end of 2022, Hofmeyr was professor and Head of Composition and Music Theory at the University of Cape Town, where he obtained his Doctorate in 1999. His Incantesimo was chosen to represent South Africa at the Congress of the International Society of Contemporary Music in Croatia in 2005, and in 2008 he was honoured with a Kanna Award by the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival. He received the UCT Creative Arts Award for his Second Symphony – The Elements in 2018. Hofmeyr’s oeuvre comprises operas, ballets, symphonies, concerti and numerous vocal and instrumental works, and includes some 140 commissioned works.

Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph was a young virtuoso pianist who studied with Goldie Zaidel, Philip Levy, Adolph Hallis, and later with John Lill at the Royal College of Music in London. Her B.Mus and M.Mus degrees were both awarded with distinction and in 1979, under Prof Stefans Grové, she became the first woman in South Africa to obtain a Doctorate in Music Composition (1979). She later received an honorary Doctorate in Education (2008).

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Zaidel-Rudolph has also made a tremendous contribution to Jewish music in Johannesburg as pianist, musical director, composer and arranger for the hugely successful show Celebration, which was premiered in Johannesburg in (1994). Subsequently, since 2000, Celebration has been performed to great acclaim in the USA, Canada, London and Australia.

In 2012, she was awarded an NRF Research Grant in the Music Division at Wits University for 6 years for creative and conventional research. She acquired the title of Professor Emeritus at Wits University in 2014.