15 APRIL - 1 MAY 2018

Valletta

Jury

Numa Bischof Ullmann (born in 1970 in Basel, Switzerland) has been the artistic and executive director of the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra since 2004.

During his tenure, the orchestra has become one of the leading Swiss orchestras with an international scope. Having nearly doubled both its budget and its number of concerts, the orchestra today performs in first-class venues all over Europe and Asia and records for global labels. His commitments to new music is strong and as result of this, numerous commissions for new orchestra works have been given to world class composers such as Rihm, Dalbavie, Dusapin, Gubaidulina, MacMillan, David Lang to name just a few. The world premiere of a new concerto by Rodion Shchedrin for piano, cello and orchestra dedicated to Martha Argerich has been a milestone in his artistic achievements.

Numa also developed a new entrepreneurial approach to financing and running a cultural institution. For this purpose, in 2008 he founded the private foundation “Foundation for the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester” funded by major Swiss entrepreneurs thanks to which the orchestra could be strongly expanded by an additional twenty musicians.

He is also the founder and artistic director of a new festival called Zaubersee - Russian Music and centered in Lucerne, Switzerland, and served as the vice president of the board of the national association for professional orchestras.

Besides this, he serves as a board member of the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, an international grant making foundation as well as of the Kimmel Foundation Switzerland.

In 2016, Numa has been invited by the Wuerth family, one of Germany’s largest industrial group, to serve as a board member of their new concert hall which will be inaugurated in summer 2017 at group’s head quarter near Stuttgart.

Since 2013, Numa has been the artistic advisor of WORLD.MINDS, an international community of global leaders in science, the arts and business based in Zürich, Switzerland. He has been teaching as a guest professor at the arts management faculty of University of Zürich as well as of Music Academy of Lucerne.

Numa served also as a board member of the international Sergej Rachmaninoff Foundation and acted as a jury member for various competitions and award-giving institutions such as the International Busoni Piano Competition (Italy) and the International Gilmore Award (USA).

Previous to his nomination as director of the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, Numa has been the managing director of the Basel Sinfonietta as well as of a Dutch music publishing company based in Amsterdam. He also was the owner of a small music management agency.

Numa studied languages, musicology and cello in Basel and Zürich and received a degree in business at the HWV Basel. Raised in Switzerland, France and Italy with extensive travels to the USA, Asia, Africa, North and South America, a multilingual environment remains a crucial necessity in his life. Numa lives in Lucerne where he is married and a father of two children.