© Shaleah Feinstein
The American violinist Lucas Stratmann studied at the Juilliard School, receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees under the tutelage of Prof. Sylvia Rosenberg and Prof. Masao Kawasaki. He served as concertmaster of the Juilliard Orchestra from 2020-2021.
Lucas Stratmann is a prizewinner of numerous competitions, including the 2016 Aspen Music Festival Violin Competition. In 2015, he was awarded the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Young Artist Award from NPR’s “From the Top”. Since then, he has performed as soloist and chamber musician in the USA and Japan, appearing at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, and David Geffen Hall. He has also performed as a soloist on three separate concert series with The Little Orchestra Society and is active as a teacher.
Lucas Stratmann has spent his summers studying and performing at the Aspen Music Festival, the Mozarteum Summer Academy in Salzburg and the Taos School of Music.
Robert Bauerstatter studied viola with Siegfried Führlinger and Peter Ochsenhofer at the Vienna University of Music in 1989. From 1998 he was a member of the Lower Austrian Tonkünstler Orchestra. In 2001 he became violist of the Vienna State Opera, and since 2004 he has been a member of the Vienna Philharmonic, where he became vocalist. In addition to his work in the orchestra, he is an avid chamber musician. As a guest of the Küchl Quartet or the Wiener Kammerensemble, as well as a member of his own ensembles, he played numerous concerts, radio and TV broadcasts and recorded 20 CDs. As a soloist he has performed with various Austrian and Bulgarian orchestras and the Orquesta Filarmonica de la UNAM in Mexico City. In Schloss Altenhof (Upper Austria) he has performed annually since 2006 with the Altenhof Ensemble as well as with artists such as Lang Lang and Yefim Bronfman at benefit chamber concerts for the benefit of the Sovereign Order of Malta. For this work, he was awarded the Cross of Merit Pro Merito Melitensi in 2013.
© Andrej Grilc
Benedikt Hellsberg, born in 1994 in Vienna, received his first cello lessons from the age of eight with Cecilia Ottensamer at the Private University of Music and Art of the City of Vienna, where he completed the preparatory course until 2013. This year he moved to the class of Robert Nagy at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, and in September 2014 he joined the class of Othmar Müller at the Joseph Haydn Conservatory of Burgenland. From the beginning of the 2019/20 season he is a member of the Orchestra Academy of the Bruckner Orchestra Linz.
Among his most important concert partners at the Wiener Musikverein, the Wiener Staatsoper, the Festspielhaus in Salzburg and the Altenhofer Schlosskonzerten in Upper Austria are Yefim Bronfman, Lang Lang, Emmanuel Tjeknavorian, Herbert Lippert, Gottlieb Wallisch, Friedemann Katt, Dieter Flury and Clemens and Dominik Hellsberg.