Esther Apituley was born in Amsterdam. She started playing the violin at the age of twelve and quickly moved on to the viola.
She graduated from the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam, having been taught by Mischa Geller, and went on to study with Bruno Giuranna at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin.
Esther Apituley was one of the instigators behind the Microkosmos project, to music by Béla Bartòk, a performance with visual elements by Jeroen Henneman. The NPS broadcast Microkosmos as a series.
Apituley presented the TV programme ‘Reiziger in Muziek’ (Traveller in music) in 2000.
Esther Apituley has appeared as a soloist with ensembles including the Dutch National Ballet Orchestra, North Holland Philharmonic, Metropole Orchestra and the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra. She has performed viola concertos by Berlioz, Bartok and Chiel Meijering, Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante and Lachrymae by Britten.
Ms. Apituley also makes regular international solo appearances in Japan, Spain, Germany, the Czech Republic and elsewhere. In the summers of 2007 and 2008, she gave concerts and masterclasses at the International Music Festival in Campos do Jordao, Brazil.
Esther Apituley is now well known for her quite unique way of presenting concerts. For instance, her appearances with the Amsterdam Viola Quartet also represent a particular break from tradition. The Quartet’s repertoire is wide-ranging, from baroque through classical to modern and close harmony.
They have now had considerable success at home and abroad, including appearances in Morocco, the Czech Republic, Austria and Cyprus, and a lengthier tour of Indonesia in 2010. The Amsterdam Viola Quartet is also regularly joined by guest artistes, such as the tap dancer Peter Kuit, actor Hans Dagelet, whistler Geert Chatrou or mime artist Rob van Reijn. The Quartet has now given thirty or so concerts with actors Hans Dagelet and Lizzy Timmers, in “De Hydropathen”.
Her first CD, 'Violent Viola', appeared in 2005 and was followed in 2007 by 'Viola Voila', to very warm reviews in all the newspapers. Her third CD, including works by Brahms and Poulenc appeared in 2011.
Esther Apituley was appointed artistic director of the ViolaViola Foundation in 2009. This Foundation is devoted to promoting the viola, and also to encouraging new audiences, partly through the medium of the Viola Festival. After successful runs in 2012 and 2014, the third edition of the festival – entitled Esther Apituley’s Locomotive – will be held in 2016.

Benjamin Britten is one most important British composers from the second half of the twentieth century. Remarkably, he focused on opera, a dying genre, at least in its current form. Britten's contributions however, among which Peter Grimes, The Rape of Lucretia, Gloriana, The Turn of the Screw, and Death in Venice, managed to remain core repertoire for opera companies to this day. Many of these productions included a role for his artistic partner and life companion Peter Pears. Britten also wrote a number of lieder for this tenor, among which his Serenade for tenor, horn and string orchestra. Yet, Britten excelled in many more genres. He wasn't even 20 years old when he composed his brilliant Phantasy for hobo quartet and his friendship with the legendary cellist Rostropovich led to a Cello sonata, three Suites for cello solo and a Symphony for Cello and orchestra in the 1960s.

Britten never became Master of the Queen's Music, yet he surely had feeling for public sentiments. For example, as a pacifist, he taught his people about world peace through his War Requiem from 1962. Britten was an excellent interpreter of his own work, just like Bartók and Stravinsky. Many of his recordings have been matched, but never exceeded.

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. He enriched established German styles through his skill in counterpoint, harmonic and motivic organisation, and the adaptation of rhythms, forms, and textures from abroad, particularly from Italy and France. Bach's compositions include the Brandenburg Concertos, the Goldberg Variations, the Mass in B minor, two Passions, and hundreds of cantatas. His music is revered for its technical command, artistic beauty, and intellectual depth.

Bach's abilities as an organist were highly respected during his lifetime, although he was not widely recognised as a great composer until a revival of interest in and performances of his music in the first half of the 19th century. He is now generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time.

Paul Hindemith studied violin at the Dr Hoch's Konservatorium of Frankfurt and played from 1915 to 1923 in the Frankfurt opera. From 1921 to 1929 he played viola in the Amar Quarter, where he was advocate for contemporary music. Throughout the years, he held multiple positions as teachers, but he remained most popular as a violist. During the Second Worldwar he fleed to the USA and was given the American nationality in 1948, Later, he returned to Europe to teach at the university of Zürich.
His use rhythm, called "Motorik" by himself (a combination of Motor and Musik) is piercing, and at times even tormenting. It echoes the arrival of industralisation and the motor, as Hindemith opposes any form of sentimentality, psychology or personality. This way, Hinemith created shrill, neoclassicistic music (Gebrauchsmusik, music with a social or political aim). His body of works is quite extensive, with more than 100 compositions in all kinds of genres. Even though he was an advocate of contemporary music, he never felt affiliated with dodecaphony. He wrote several theoretic treatises, among which his Unterweisung im Tonsatz from 1937 in which Hindemith offers several systems in which the tension between intervals, harmony and melody is analysed and elevated into a compositional technique.

Zoltán Kodály was a Hungarian composer, born in 1905. If you would read Kodály's biography, you could only do so with increasing astonishment. Not only did he reach the honarable age of 84, throughout his whole life he remained astoundingly prolific - and with great success. Moreover, besides his work as a composer, Kodály was active as a conductor, (ethno-)musicologist, pedagogue, linguist, and philosopher. And in each of these areas, he had a pioneering role, always with exceptional passion and dedication. To name but one example: together with his friend Belá Bartók he worked on a ten volume reference guide to Hungarian music, which appeared from 1951 with each volume spanning more than a thousand pages.
Yet, Kodály gained acclaim for his compositions as well, with his Psalmus hungaricus (1923) en his opera Háry János (1926) as the pinnacles of his musical career. The core of his body of work consists of vocal music, in particular works for choir, but his instrumental music is just as impressive. His master piece Laudes Organi, written one year before his death, truly proves that Kodály's creative energy stayed with him to the bitter end.