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Stephen Coombs is one of the leading English pianists of his generation, active not only as a soloist and recitalist but as a chamber player and duo pianist. While his repertory includes mainstream compositions by Mendelssohn, Debussy, Ravel, Scriabin, and others, he has become particularly well known for his interpretations of works by lesser-known late-Romantic composers, such as Arensky, Bortkiewicz, Glazunov, Reynaldo Hahn, and many others. Coombs has achieved acclaim for his recordings in the massive Hyperion series The Romantic Piano Concerto, wherein he has performed with distinction concertos by both familiar (Mendelssohn) and unfamiliar composers (Alexander Goedike, et al.).

Coombs was born in Birkenhead (near Liverpool), England, on July 11, 1960. He exhibited talent early on, capturing second prize at England's National Piano Competition when he was 13. His first serious studies were at the Royal Northern College of Music, Junior School, after which he studied at the Royal College of Music. His teachers included Joan Slade, Heather Slade-Lipkin, and Gordon Green.

Throughout the 1980s Coombs slowly built his career, both at home and abroad, appearing as a recitalist and soloist with major orchestras. But he developed his parallel career as a chamber music performer and duo pianist now, as well. In 1989 he recorded a disc of Debussy works for two pianos with Christopher Scott on the Hyperion label. Three years later he made the first of four recordings for the same label in its Romantic Piano Concerto series, with the F minor Piano Concerto by Arensky and the First Piano Concerto of Bortkiewicz.

Coombs followed with a string of assorted recordings for Hyperion, including a series, begun in 1994, devoted to the complete solo piano music of Glazunov. Further discs containing various rarities quickly followed, with the critical consensus consistently positive.

In 1998 and 1999, Coombs served both as festival director and artistic director of Pianoworks -- the International Piano Festival, held in London. In the early 2000s he joined the chamber group Room-Music, which made two recordings for Hyperion, the first containing chamber works by Hahn (2003) and the latter with music by Catoire (2004). Room-Music was chosen as ensemble in residence for the 2004-2005 season at St. John's, Smith Square, London. Among recent recordings by Coombs was the 2006 CD of solo piano works of Glazunov on Helios (Hyperion), the fourth and final volume in the series.

Reynaldo Hahn is often considered an archetypal French composer -- a product of effective French music education coupled with the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Paris. The fact that Hahn was not actually French (he was born in Caracas, Venezuela) has never deterred this notion -- even among the nationalistic French -- since he made Paris his home for nearly his entire life. Today, as he was during his life, he is best known for his vocal works, ranging from serious opera and operetta to solo songs. His affinity for both the stage and the human voice eventually led to his appointment in 1945 as director of the Paris Opéra.

Hahn's parents were of German and Venezuelan extraction; when he was three years old the family relocated to Paris, where Hahn entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1886. He studied harmony with Théodore Dubois, piano with Decombes and composition with Jules Massenet. Massenet's influence is clear in one of Hahn's earliest, and most famous, songs, Si mes vers avaient des ailes (If my verses had wings); written when the composer was only 13, it is a charming setting of verses by Victor Hugo. The combined forces of Massenet's advocacy on his behalf (enough to have his cycle of songs on the poetry of Paul Verlaine, Chansons grises, published in 1893) and Hahn's own fine singing voice (enabling him to accompany himself in salons and concert halls) helped to establish his reputation in the city.

Early in his career, Hahn made the acquaintance of Sarah Bernhardt and Marcel Proust; Proust, especially, would instill in Hahn a deep appreciation and understanding of poetry, which had a profound effect on Hahn's approach to vocal composition. Hahn once wrote, "The genuine beauty of singing consists in a perfect unison, an amalgam, a mysterious alloy of the singing and the speaking voice, or to put it better, the melody and the spoken word." Hahn found himself seduced by the poetry of Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, and Paul Verlaine; he put his efforts toward creating musical phrasing and rhythmic gestures that would allow the words to speak for themselves. Hahn believed that "[o]nly form can give a piece a chance of lasting...." This perhaps explains his predilection for the older, repetitive formal structures evident in some of his songs, such as "L'automne" (Autumn), "Le printemps" (Spring), and "Quand je fus pris au pavillion" (When I was Lured to her Pavilion).

Hahn's first stage composition was incidental music for Daudet's L'obstacle in 1890; his first opera to reach the stage was the three-act L'île du rêve, performed in Paris at the Opéra-Comique in 1898; a more successful serious opera appeared in 1935 (Le marchand de Venise, in three acts, with a libretto by Zamacoïs, after Shakespeare). Notably, with Le marchand de Venise, Hahn deliberately returned to the "old-fashioned" division between musical numbers and recitatives and returned the orchestra to a purely accompanimental role. Hahn's most important ballet, Le dieu bleu, was composed in 1912 for Diaghilev's company (to a scenario by Cocteau and Madrazo). By far, Hahn's most successful theater piece is his operetta Ciboulette; it premiered to instant acclaim in Paris in 1923, and has received innumerable performances since.

As a conductor and impresario at the Paris Opéra, Hahn favored the operas of Mozart; he found the earlier composer so fascinating, in fact, that he composed a musical comedy on his life (Mozart, 1925), in which he included pastiches of Mozart's own music.

The Chilingirian Quartet is one of the best-known string quartets based in Britain, with numerous recordings over a three-decade career. Its founder is Levon Chilingirian, born in Cyprus of Armenian descent to a family with a long musical heritage. He started playing the violin when he was five years old and had lessons with the violin virtuoso Manoug Parikian.

The quartet began attracting attention soon after its founding in 1971 and appeared on the BBC early on. These broadcasts were followed by invitations to appear at the Edinburgh, Bath, and Aldeburgh festivals, then by invitations to perform at major musical centers. It has become one of the best-known quartets around the world, traveling to all six inhabited continents and having played in more than 30 countries. These have included several coast-to-coast tours of the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, as well as tours to Australia and New Zealand, Japan, Africa, and South America. The Chilingirian Quartet plays annual series of concerts at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall and Wigmore Hall. Other major venues include the Herkulessaal in Munich, Zurich's Tonhalle, the Vienna Konzerthaus, and the Tivoli in Copenhagen.

It has appeared in concert on most European national television stations, on National Public Radio in the U.S., and on the CBC. The group has recorded extensively on the EMI, RCA, CRD, Nimbus, Chandos, Conifer, and Virgin Records labels. These recordings have included a broad representation of the basic works in the quartet repertory, as well as music of lesser-known and contemporary composers. Among the latter are the world premieres of Hugh Wood's quartets Nos. 1-4, quartet works of Stravinsky, Schnittke, Roslavets, and Firsova, and music of Arvo Pärt, Andrzej Panufnik, John Tavener, and Michael Tippett. Three of the Chilingirian members participated in the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra's recording of Tippett's Triple Concerto.

In 1986 the Chilingirian was named ensemble-in-residence at the Royal College of Music in London and regularly gives master classes there. It won the Royal Philharmonic Society's Chamber Ensemble Award for 1995.

Levon Chilingirian is also the conductor of Camerata Romana, a chamber orchestra. He is a professor of violin on the faculty of the Royal College and performs as a violin soloist, having appeared with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Liverpool Philharmonic. He plays a 1729 Stradivarius violin. The other members of the quartet are violinist Charles Sewart, violist Asdis Valdimarsdottir, and cellist Philip de Groote.

Born blind, Vierne partially regained sight at age six. Obvious talent was rewarded with piano and solfège studies, to which were added harmony, violin, and a general course when he entered the Institution National des Jeunes Aveugles in Paris in 1880. There he was befriended by César Franck who, from 1886, gave him private tuition in harmony while including Vierne in his organ class at the Paris Conservatoire. The lessons of the master were not lost on him -- Franck possessed perhaps the richest harmonic palette in Western music and Vierne effortlessly absorbed many of its features. Vierne entered the Conservatoire as a full-time student in 1890. Franck died in November, succeeded by Charles-Marie Widor as professor of organ. Vierne soon became Widor's assistant, a post he continued to hold under Guilmant -- where he taught Dupré and Nadia Boulanger -- and deputized for Widor at St. Sulpice. Vierne took the Conservatoire's first prize for organ in 1894, though his career waited until 1900 to be spectacularly launched when, on May 21, he triumphed over four other organists in a competition for the prestigious post of titular organist at Notre Dame de Paris (its magnificent instrument reconditioned by Cavaillé-Coll) where his audience came to include such luminaries as Clémenceau and Rodin. The Symphony No. 1 for organ (1898-1899) forecasts the succession of moods -- grand and assertively virile, searchingly contrapuntal, effusive, and distressingly confessional -- which would deepen anguishingly in succeeding works, reflecting an unhappy marriage and divorce, professional disappointments, the loss of a son and a brother in the Great War, and a continual battle to retain minimal sight. After being passed over for professorship of the Conservatoire's organ class in 1911, Vierne taught at the Schola Cantorum. His Symphony No. 2 for organ, completed in 1903, drew from no less a critic than Debussy the stunning accolade, "M. Vierne's symphony is truly remarkable. It combines rich musicality with ingenious discoveries in the special sonority of the organ. J.S. Bach, the father of us all, would have been well pleased...." The spate of disturbingly eloquent compositions -- mélodies, piano pieces, chamber works, mass settings, the Symphony in A, and numerous works for organ (including, at last, six symphonies) -- continued to pour forth until his death. Concert tours took him to England in 1924 and 1925, and on to a three-month visit to the U.S. and Canada in 1927. Vierne died of a heart attack at the organ of Notre Dame during a public concert on June 2, 1937.