Hendrikx is in high demand as a concert soloist, and he has appeared with a great selection of acclaimed orchestras. Especially noteworthy was his recent Mozart tour across Flanders and The Netherlands with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of Edward Gardner.

Roeland Hendrikx’ presence on concert stages around the world should not obscure his deep love of chamber music. Hendrikx has cooperated with acclaimed colleagues like Severin Von Eckardstein, Liebrecht Vanbeckevoort, Jan Michiels, the Panocha Quartet, Tempera Quartet, Doric Quartet, Danel Quartet, Silesian String Quartet and the Berliner Philharmoniker Streichquintett. In 2015, Roeland founded the Roeland Hendrikx Ensemble, which focuses on the rich repertoire for clarinet, piano and strings.

Hendrikx’s latest release “The clarinet as prima donna” features clarinet concertos and opera arias by Carl Maria von Weber with the Rheinische Philharmonie and award-winning arranger Andreas Tarkmann, who fashioned a new cadenza for the first concerto, and recomposed Leise, leise, the central aria from Der Freischütz, for clarinet and orchestra.

Roeland Hendrikx’s other recording activities bear testimony to an unusual versatility. In 2018, he enlisted the venerable London Philharmonic Orchestra to enregister the Mozart, Finzi and Bruch concertos, an accomplishment that “had it all”, according to Diapason: “accuracy, lyricism, elegance”. Following this large-scale extravaganza, Hendrikx scaled down to smaller line-ups. In 2020 he tackled Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint in an immersive recording adventure (called The Harmony of Isolation), followed by a crossover project which fused Saint-Saëns Carnaval des Animaux and Apollinaire’s literary Bestiaire in a chamber-musical Animal Farm, hailed by France Musique as a “magnificent rearrangement (…) of compositions at once musical, pictorial, and poetic”.

Roeland has many acclaimed chamber music recordings to his credit, including the Mozart and Brahms Clarinet Quintets (“chamber music at its best” – De Standaard), the Debussy and Poulenc Sonatas (“a delight” –Gramophone), and the Clarinet Quintet by Piet Swerts (“infinitely seductive” – Resmusica).

Martyn Brabbins was appointed music director of the English National Opera in 2016. An inspirational force in British music, Brabbins has had a busy opera career since his early days at the Kirov and more recently at La Scala, the Bayerische Staatsoper, and regularly in Lyon, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Antwerp. He is a popular figure at the BBC Proms and with many of the UK’s top orchestras, and regularly conducts top international orchestras such as the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra and Deutsches Symphonie- Orchester Berlin.

Known for his advocacy of new music and particularly of British composers, he has conducted hundreds of world premières across the globe. He has recorded over 120 CDs to date, including prizewinning discs of operas by Korngold, Birtwistle and Harvey. He was associate principal conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (1994–2005), principal guest conductor of the Royal Flemish Philhar- monic (2009–15), chief conductor of the Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra (2012– 16) and artistic director of the Cheltenham International Festival of Music (2005– 07), and in 2016 was appointed visiting professor at the Royal College of Music.