The Stellenbosch International Chamber Music Festival is the brainchild of its long-standing Artistic Director, concert pianist and professor at the Department of Music at Stellenbosch University, Nina Schumann. 17 years ago, Nina Schumann and Luis Magalhães, also a concert pianist and associate professor at Stellenbosch University attended a similar festival in Austria. The bug bit and they started planning for the first SICMF that took place in Stellenbosch in 2004.

Peter and Suzanne Martens, husband and wife, and violinist and cellist respectively, participated in the 2004 event and have also been inextricably tied up in the SICMF ever since. Peter is currently the SICMF Director.

Schumann, Magalhães, and the Martens’s will of course be part of the 2018 SICMF line-up alongside a host of internationally acclaimed artists including the husband and wife duo of Alexander Buzlov (cellist) and Alissa Margulis (violinst). Buzlov currently teaches at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatoire and concertizes worldwide. Margulis, also a musician of international repute has recently been appointed professor at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen.

One of the newest additions to the SICMF faculty is the internationally acclaimed Russian violin virtuoso Marc Bouchkov. Bouchkov is the nephew of Julia Bushkova who was on the SICMF faculty in 2005. Bouchkov is also the son of the award-winning violinist and conductor Evgeny Bushkov who conducted the SICMF Symphony Orchestra in 2013.

And if this does not yet sound like a family affair, how about this year’s SICMF Symphony Orchestra conductor and faculty violist, Xandi van Dijk, who will not only conduct a new composition written by his brother Matthijs van Dijk (incidentally also the composer of Moments in a Life featuring Denis Goldberg premiered at the SICMF in 2016), but who is the son of well-known SA composer, Peter Louis van Dijk, featured at the SICMF in 2008, 2013 and 2017.

The SICMF takes place between 5 and 14 July and tickets are selling at Computicet.