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More about Wissam Boustany – flute

Born in 1960, Wissam Boustany’s career as a flute soloist and teacher has taken him to South and North America, Europe Middle, Africa and the Far East. In 1995 Wissam founded Toward Humanity, an initiative using music as a catalyst to support humanitarian projects on an international scale. Born in Lebanon, Boustany began his musical studies with his stepfather, who was a violinist. In 1977 he moved to Britain where he studied at Chetham’s School of Music and the Royal Northern College of Music, with Trevor Wye. He has received many awards, notably the Silver Medal in the 1982 Madeira International Flute Competition and (in the same year) the woodwind prize in the Royal Overseas League Competition. He received the silver medal in the Shell/LSO competition and won the 2nd prize in the woodwind section of the first BBC Young Musician of the Year (1978).
In 1997 he was awarded a knighthood in Lebanon (Chevalier de l’Ordre du Cedre) in recognition of his music and peace work, and on 3rd February 1998 he was presented with the Crystal Award at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
More recently, Wissam has taken a keen interest in conducting, with the year 2018 seeing the launch of his new orchestra, the Pro Youth Philharmonia, designed to create high profile performance and training opportunities for emerging musicians aged 22-32, while propagating Wissam’s teachings, which have become known as his “Method Called Love” – a distillation of the creative and learning process into the single most potent force within our lives: Love.
Wissam continues to perform and teach, which still provide him with the foundation for his musical inspiration. He plays on a Brannen Kingma-System quartertone flute which he has had since the year 2000, with a headjoint made by Miguel Arista.

More about Aleksander Szram – piano

Aleksander Szram specialises in performing music of the 20th and 21st Centuries, and has released several albums of contemporary repertoire on the Prima Facie record label, including the Piano Concerto by Daryl Runswick, Inner Landscapes (Douglas Finch), A Land so Luminous (Kenneth Hesketh), and the album Aztec Dances with the recorder player Jill Kemp. He has recorded for Nimbus with the flautist Wissam Boustany, and given premieres of works by Frederic Rzewski, Dai Fujikura, Haris Kittos, Edward Gregson and David Bedford, among others. As pianist in the ensemble Gemini, he has recorded three albums with Métier, including works by Jonathan Harvey, Sadie Harrison, Huw Watkins, Philip Grange, and the first recording of Mandala 3 by David Lumsdaine. As well as Gemini, Aleks has worked with Lontano and the Continuum Ensemble. He has performed in more than forty countries over six continents, and teaches piano, chamber music and academic studies at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where he is BMus Programme Leader and a Senior Teaching Fellow. He has appeared on BBC Radio3, Classic FM, Channel 4, and also on Colombian and Lebanese television. He is one of the few pianists who regularly performs chamber music from memory.
Dr Aleksander Szram SFHEA
Programme Leader: BMus and Foundation
Senior Teaching Fellow