János Kovács was born in Budapest in 1951 and graduated from the Music Academy in 1971. He has been a conductor at the Hungarian Opera House since 1979 and was musical assistant at the Bayreuth Festival in 1979-1981. He received the Liszt Award in 1984 and worked as leading conductor at the Hungarian State Opera from 1987 to 1990, and again since 2002. He is a principle guest conductor of the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra and a principle conductor of the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2001, Kovács was appointed principle guest conductor of the Budapest Philharmonic Society. In the same year, he was presented the Kossuth Prize, Hungary's highest honour for artists.
Andrea Meláth graduated from the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music as a singer in 1998. She went to the Bayreuth Festival on scholarship in 1996 and won the Ministry of Culture's Annie Fischer scholarship in 1998. She has won an award from the Artisjus Music Foundation and has had three solo performances in the Music Academy's Nádor hall which were recorded by Hungarian Radio. In 1998, she sang the role of Dido in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, conducted by Catherina Mackintosh. She has sung with the Hungarian State Opera company since 1999 and has been performed at the International Music Festival in Brno and the Hungarian Institute in Paris. She has also sung in Madeira and London.
Barnabás Dukay, born 1950, studied composition at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music between 1969 and 1974. He was a teacher at the Béla Bartók Music Secondary School between from 1974 to 1991 and at the Ferenc Liszt College of Music's teacher training department from 1991 to 1995. He started working at the Academy of Music in 1995 and has been a lecturer since 2000. He worked as a composer and performer as a member of the New Music Studio between 1970 and 1990. He received the Soros Foundation Award in 1997 and again in 2003, and the Ferenc Erkel Award in 2000.
