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Paul Rivinius is best known as a chamber music player and as a vocal accompanist. He has performed and recorded on both the piano and the French horn.

Rivinius was born in Munich, Germany, in 1970. His first instrument was the piano, which he took up at age five. He attended the Musikhochschule Saarbrücken, studying piano with Nerine Barrett, Walter Blankenheim, and Alexander Sellier. After completing his studies there, he moved to the Musikhochschule Frankfurt and studied both piano (with Raymund Havenith) and horn (with Marie-Luise Neunecker). Rivinius rounded off his studies with Gerhard Oppitz at the Musikhochschule München, receiving a degree with distinction in the school's advanced piano course in 1998. By that time, his professional career was already well underway. He played horn for several years with the Bundesjugendorchester Deutschland and the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester youth orchestras, in the latter under the baton of Claudio Abbado. In 1996, Rivinius joined the Clemente Trio on piano, and with that group won major prizes, including the ARD Competition in 1998. He toured with the Clemente Trio to New York's Carnegie Hall and Wigmore Hall in London. Rivinius also began performing chamber music with his brother Gustav, a cellist. They added two more brothers and began performing as the Rivinius Piano Quartet. In 2004, Rivinius replaced Tamara-Anna Cislowska in the Mozart Piano Quartet, a chamber group that has toured Europe, North America, and South America. For some years, he juggled these responsibilities with teaching at the Academy of Music Hanns Eisler in Berlin; he later began performing on a freelance basis in Munich.

Rivinius has a large catalog of recordings made with various other chamber performers on labels, including BIS, MDG, and CAvi-Music. He has often recorded with cellist Johannes Moser; the pair issued the three-volume survey Brahms and His Contemporaries on the Hänssler Classic label late in the 2000s decade. He has also recorded viola-and-piano music with violist Christian Euler. Additionally, Rivinius is active as a vocal accompanist and in 2020 backed soprano Camilla Tilling on a BIS album of songs associated with the Jugendstil artistic movement. ~ James Manheim

Cellist Gabriel Schwabe has been a fast-rising star of his instrument, earning critical comparisons to such greats of the past as Emanuel Feuermann. In a competition named for Feuermann, a Schwabe win touched off the young player's impressive run of contest victories.

Schwabe was born in Berlin in 1988; his background is German and Spanish. His mother was a piano teacher, and he absorbed a great deal of music in her studio when students came for lessons and soon took up the piano himself. He later switched to the violin and was finally drawn to the cello, enrolling at the University of the Arts in Berlin, where he studied with Catalin Ilea. Schwabe moved on to the Kronberg Academy and the teaching of Frans Helmerson, and he took master classes with Janos Starker, Gidon Kremer, and Gary Hoffman. Even as a teen, Schwabe was winning important competitions: after the Grand Prix Emanuel Feuermann in 2006, he won the German National Music Competition the following year and the Pierre Fournier Award in London in 2009.

Both concerto appearances and chamber music performances have been represented in Schwabe's concert career since then. He has played the Tchaikovsky violin concerto with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and has appeared with Britain's Philharmonia Orchestra as well as the resurgent NDR Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Northern Sinfonia. In chamber concerts, he has collaborated with such A-listers as Isabelle Faust, Christian Tetzlaff, Albrecht Mayer, and Nicolai Gerassimez, with whom he gave his recital debut at London's Wigmore Hall in 2010. Schwabe has appeared at major festivals in Europe and beyond, including the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival, and Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. Signed to the Naxos label in 2015, Schwabe released a Brahms recital with pianist Nicholas Rimmer. His relationship with Naxos is an exclusive one, and a 2017 album devoted to the complete works for cello and orchestra of Camille Saint-Saëns won critical praise. In 2018, Schwabe issued a recording of Schumann's Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 129, with the Royal Northern Sinfonia under conductor Lars Vogt. The following year saw Schwabe join violinist Tianwa Yang for a recording of the Brahms Double Concerto, Op. 102, with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and in 2020, he joined violinist Hellen Weiß (to whom he is married) on an album of works by Kodály and Ligeti. He released the album Elgar, Bridge: Cello Concertos on Naxos in 2021 with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Schwabe is on the faculty at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne, Germany, and the Konservatorium Maastricht in the Netherlands. ~ James Manheim