Kristina Arakelyan
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​Described as a ‘rising star’ by the BBC Music Magazine, Kristina Arakelyan is an award-winning composer, pianist and educator. She studied at the Royal Academy of Music and Oxford University, and is currently completing her doctoral studies at King’s College, London, where she leads music theory and composition seminars. She also teaches composition and music theory at the Junior Royal Academy of Music and at Surrey University. Her compositions, which are often described as lyrical and moving, have been heard on BBC Radio 3 and in distinguished London venues including the Royal Albert Hall, the Southbank Centre, St John’s Smith Square, St Martin-in-the-Fields and the Wigmore Hall, as well as in concert halls in Belgium, Croatia, France, Mexico, Spain, the USA, and in her native Armenia.
Kristina’s recent collaborators have included the BBC Singers, the National Youth Choir of Great Britain and National Children’s Orchestra of Great Britain, the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Choir of Pembroke College, Oxford, and the Grimeborn Opera Festival. Her music has been featured on the NMC label and on Signum Records, and her piece Daydream was chosen for inclusion in the 2023–2024 ABRSM Grade 2 piano syllabus. Kristina was selected by the BBC as the 2022 UK representative in the prestigious International Rostrum of Composers (IRC), and her a cappella Seascapes was nominated for a 2022 Ivors Academy Composer Award in the choral category.

Sylvia Lim

​Sylvia Lim is a London-based composer. Her works are intimate, exploring a small amount of material in depth. She is interested in the materiality of sound, notions of close listening, perception, rawness and instability.
 
Recent commissions include music for Ars Nova Ensemble Instrumental, Mira Benjamin (Music We’d Like to Hear), EXAUDI, The Hermes Experiment, Prague Quiet Music Collective, and Tabea Debus + Samuele Telari. Her music was published in the CoMA Partsong Book, and performed at the London Contemporary Music Festival, CoMA Festival, BEAST FEaST 2021 and Barbican OpenFest’s Unfinished. She was on the LPO Young Composers Programme and Psappha’s Composing for Piano scheme in 2019/20, the RPS Composers Programme as a Rosie Johnson RPS / Wigmore Hall Apprentice Composer in 2020/21, and Orkest De Ereprijs’s 28th Young Composers Meeting (2022). Her music has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, ABC Classic and KFAI.
 
Sylvia completed her PhD, MMus and BMus (Hons) at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, winning the Ian Horsbrugh Memorial Prize for Composition in 2015. She now teaches composition there and at The Purcell School.

​Vinthya Perinpanathan

​Vinthya Perinpanathan is a Netherlands-born, London-based, composer, violinist and DJ, due to begin her PhD research in ancient Sri Lankan ritualistic and religious music in September 2023. Vinthya's Sri Lankan heritage and hyphenated, British-Sri Lankan identity is clearly expressed through her combining of Western and South Asian music traditions. Her duo for tabla and cello, titled ‘Sri Pada’, which was commissioned for the 2019 Commonwealth Resounds Awards Ceremony first inspired Vinthya’s interest in cross-cultural composition. Vinthya has since gained repeat, international performances of her 'Caprice in Raga Kharaharapriya', for solo violin. The summer of 2022 hosted two exciting premieres for Vinthya: her latest string quartet, ‘Flight UL505’, performed at the NSKA Strijkkwartet Festival in Utrecht, and ‘Bow’, a trio written for the Manasamitra Mentoring Scheme 2021-22, featuring Carnatic Indian vocalist, Supriya Nagarajan. Having recently returned from a trip to Bangalore for the British Council funded RhythmXchange Festival, a new collaborative project between Manchester Museum and the Indian Music Experience Museum, there are many more exciting musical excursions to be expected from this rising-star.