Maria K Jacobson Picasso
Maria K Jacobson Picasso was a student at Lundsbergs Skola 1965-1971. At the age of five she started with piano lessons. Later she joined the Lundsberg school choir and received organ lessons in the school chapel by the organist, Margit Mechler. At college in the UK Maria took singing lessons and began performing as a soloist. Soprano in a series of choirs over the years, like Kroppakören, Atlantic College Choir and its Madrigal Group, Lund Academic Choir, Sweden, Kammerkoret Camerata, (The Copenhagen Chamber Choir CAMERATA), the University Choir, Gainsville, Florida, and since the mid 80’s in choirs and ensembles in her home city, Cagliari, Sardinia. Maria continued her voice training in the Baroque Singing Bachelor at the Cagliari Conservatory of Music focusing on religious and chamber music together with a choice of the Italian opera repertory. As a linguist, Maria also acts as coach for choirs studying scores in different European languages.
Loïc D. Schlentz
The singer, actor and dancer Loïc D. Schlentz was born 1993 in Luxembourg City, where he grew up. He studied at the University of the Arts in Berlin and is now Berlin- and Luxembourg-based. He has both French and Luxembourgish nationality.
After completing secondary education, he was in 2014 admitted to the Opera Singing course at Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK) (University of the Arts, Berlin). In 2015 he switched to the course Musical/Show, which he successfully completed in 2019 expanding his vocal skills with the help of Prof. Michael Dixon.
Performing in cities like Luxembourg, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow and Katowice he gained stage experience playing various stage roles, e.g. Juliet’s nanny in Romeo and Juliet, Arlequin in Emil Jaques Dalcroze’s opera Les Jumeaux de Bergame, and a conservative politician, Henry Montand, in Welcome to Hell, 2018-19. He played the role of Erich Collin in the play Die Comedian Harmonists at Altes Schauspielhaus, Stuttgart, and took part in many concerts. He is since then a member of the vocal group The Real Comedian Harmonists and also works as a translator for a journal and a winery in Luxembourg.
Anouchka Evenhuis
Anouchka Evenhuis, was born in 1994 and grew up in Switzerland. She began her music school studies at the age of six, playing the recorder, taking up the transverse flute a few years later. Being surrounded by Early Music from a young age, she soon discovered her passion for Italian Baroque music and went on focusing mainly on the recorder. In 2011 she enrolled in a special high school music programme in Kreuzlingen, where her major instrument was the recorder. During the next four years she studied at Konservatorium Winterthur with Helma Franssen.
Anouchka holds a bachelor from Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (2018), the internationally renowned music academy in Basel, specialized in music from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Baroque periods. There she studied with Conrad Steinmann and took part in several Masterclasses with other professors. Anouchka plays all the flutes required for the historically correct performance of Early Music, with all its different tunings and fingerings. Nowadays, when she does not perform in concerts, her music skills come in handy when she teaches children in their first years of school.
Silvio Merazzi
Silvio Merazzi received his first trumpet lessons as a ten-year old at the music school, Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. He would have preferred to play the trombone, which really fascinated him, but then he would have had to grow some more in order to handle it. The trumpet was a better sized instrument for a ten-year old.
Silvio started early to play the major orchestra repertoire and to perform as a soloist. At six-form school he had his own jazz ensemble. In parallel with his studies at Technische Hochschule Zürich, ETH, (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), he studied the trumpet with Henri Adelbrecht at Musikhochschule Zürich and played in Akademisches Orchester Zürich and in other orchestras.
Over the years Silvio has regularly performed the classical repertoire for the trumpet including the important trumpet concerts, very often in churches with the orchestral part arranged for the organ. For several years, concert tours of the south of France together with a Swiss organist were part of his schedule, and in the summer months he had many occasions to make music in the Lundsberg chapel together with the school’s legendary organist, Margit Mechler (1920-2020). Silvio is a member of Kammerorchester Biel/Bienne, and since a number of years he is also member of the regional brass-band, La Concordia. His own jazz trio, which for the most part performs in private, has a tailor made repertoire consisting of jazz standards and chanon française.
Max Merazzi Jacobson
Max Merazzi-Jacobson (born 1994) is a Swiss pianist of Italian-Swedish origin. He took his first piano lessons at the age of eight and in his early youth he also played the violin and percussion.
At the age of sixteen he decided to become a pianist and initially studied with the Bulgarian pianist Roumiana Kirtcheva at the Musikschule Biel/Bienne. After two years as a student of Christian Favre at Haute École de Musique de Lausanne, Max Merazzi-Jacobson he studied at Musikakademie Basel as student of Dutch pianist Ronald Brautigam concluding with a master degree in 2020. Max Merazzi-Jacobson has performed as soloist in Grieg’s piano concerto op.16 with Bieler Sinfonieorchester and Bieler Kammerorchester as well as in Sjostakovitj’ second piano concerto op. 102 together with Bieler Jugendsinfonieorchester.
Max has also recieved tuition by the pianists Giovanni Bellucci, Inese Klotina, Jean-Sélim Abdelmoula, Rada Petkova, Mauro Lo Conte and Aglaia Graf, and he was the performer of the world premiere in Basel 2019 of Trois Pensées pour Piano op 1 by Luc Goedert.