François Salque is recognised as one of the most stunning cellists of his generation. His profound musical thinking and phenomenal technique have earned him many prestigious awards: François is a prize-winner at such international competitions as Lausanne (Unanimous First Prize), Geneva (2nd Prize), ARD Munich, Tchaikovsky in Moscow... He was each time given the highest distinctions ever awarded to a French cellist in the histories of these competitions.

His outstanding talent was equally recognised in the United-States where he obtained a Master of Music degree at Yale University as well as no less than six First Prizes in international competitions. In France, he won the First Prize of the "Hommage to Paul Tortelier and Maurice Gendron" International Competition and the Pierre Fournier Prize.

François has already performed as a soloist and in chamber music in over fifty countries with some of the world’s most renowned artists (Jean-Claude Pennetier, Alexandre Tharaud, Michel Portal, Paul Meyer, Emmanuel Pahud, Itamar Golan, Renaud Capuçon, Barry Douglas, Gil Shaham…) He has played as a soloist with such prestigious orchestras as the Münchner Rundfunk Orchestra, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Moscow chamber orchestra, the Saint-Petersburg Camerata, the Baltica Chamber Orchestra, the Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Berner Philharmonic... as well as many French orchestras. François Salque was for five years a member of the Ysaye String Quartet with which he played over 400 concerts and recorded seven CDs.

His recordings for BMG RCA, Arion or Lyrinx with pianists Eric Le Sage and Alexandre Tharaud were highly acclaimed and received many awards.

Charles Kwong is a composer from Hong Kong. Approaching music as collective experiential situations, his creative output focuses on orchestral music, instrumental compositions for musicians across diverse musical cultures, site-specific music, and transdisciplinary works that depart from the paradigm of concert music.

Kwong’s music has been internationally featured in festivals such as Lucerne Forward, Ultraschall Berlin, Takefu, Ticino Musica, La Roque d'Anthéron, Marvão and IRCAM ManiFeste, among other professional presentations. In recent years he has been commissioned by Ensemble recherche, Lucerne Festival, Takefu International Music Festival, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong New Music Ensemble (HKNME), and Hong Kong Arts Festival, among others. Other renowned groups and musicians who performed Kwong’s music include London Philharmonic Orchestra, Ensemble intercontemporain, Ensemble of Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Orchestra UniMi, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Divertimento Ensemble, Ensemble Offspring, Mario Caroli, Jeanne-Marie Conquer, Tadashi Tajima, Tosiya Suzuki, Colleen Lee, Edward Gardner, Yip Wing-sie, Christoph Poppen and Pierre-André Valade, among others.

Kwong has developed a long and fruitful collaboration with the Hong Kong Sinfonietta since 2014. Their artistic bonding, which includes a two-season appointment of Kwong as the orchestra’s Artist Associate in 2020-2022, has resulted in multiple commissions that have been showcased locally and as well globally in the orchestra’s overseas tours. With his role in Contemporary Music Research for the orchestra since 2015, Kwong also has been contributing ideas to the orchestra’s planning in contemporary repertoire and commissioning.

In 2020-2022, Kwong was engaged by Ensemble recherche for the collaborative project “the new recherche” on the subject of gentrification, for which he wrote Migrating Tracks, performed in Berlin, Munich and Freiburg. For the 60th anniversary of the Hong Kong City Hall, in 2022 Kwong was commissioned the Lullabies - an orchestral piece written for the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Edward Gardner, who hailed the work as “wonderful, having a beautiful, light, airy quality, lots of fantasy and a real underlying wistful beauty which the orchestra have really enjoyed indulging in”. In 2016, in their first ever performance in Hong Kong in the ensemble's history, the intercontemporain performed Kwong’s sextet Lachrymae.

Kwong’s interest in site specificity and transdisciplinarity of music led him to leadership roles in several extensive productions in Hong Kong. He was the curator of HKNME’s Our Audible City (2018-2019) - a one-year-long project on the subjects of site-specific music, urban soundscape, sound collecting and sound maps - for which he wrote Atlas, a series of site-specific works tailored for six non-concert spaces in Hong Kong. His research in site-specificity of music subsequently led to the conception of Requiem (2020-2021) commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary, and Lifelike (2021), commissioned by HKNME for performances at the Hong Kong Botanical and Zoological Garden. In 2022 he was commissioned by the Lucerne Festival for Elsewhere, a site-specific composition to be performed at KKL Luzern Concert hall whose world premiere was reviewed by Luzernerzeitung as "enchanting the concert hall". For his research in site specificity, Kwong took artist residencies at the Zurich University of the Arts and at the Tai Kwun Contemporary Artists' Studio in 2020.

Born in 1985 in Hong Kong, Kwong in his formative years studied music at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and King’s College London, before earning his doctorate in compositions in 2013 from The University of York under the supervision of Thomas Simaku. His artistic development has benefited significantly through tutelages of Toshio Hosokawa, Francesco Filidei, Mauro Lanza and Oscar Bianchi, among others.