Ann Cnop has been passionate about music from a very young age. At the age of 7, she is inseparable from her violin and already feels at home on a stage. She spent her teenage years at the Mechelen City Conservatory where she took violin lessons with Frans Vos and chamber music lessons with Florent Van de Vondel. During this period, she successfully participates in the Herman Krebbers competition for violin and wins first prize in the Willem Kerstens chamber music competition. This also gives Ann the opportunity to work with various orchestras as a soloist, gaining extensive orchestral experience. At the age of 17, she chose the Lemmens Institute in Leuven to start her higher studies. She studies violin with Elisa Kawaguti. She obtained her Master (magna cum laude) and continued her studies for baroque violin at the Brussels Conservatory with Sigiswald Kuijken. She ends her studies with another Master (magna cum laude) and receives the Ingeborg Köberle prize, awarded annually to the two most promising students. In recent years, Ann has been a sought-after soloist and chamber musician on international stages from Mexico to Japan. With La Petite Bande, she played Bach’s violin concertos and Mozart’s Symphonie Concertante, among others. With Il Fondamento, she soloed in Mendelssohn’s violin concerto. Ann is concertmaster of the German orchestra Concert Royal Köln and of Scherzi Musicali. She can often be seen at work in duo with Thomas Boodts (piano) and with her string quartet Quatuor a4. For some years now, she has been researching performance practice in the Romantic era. This is also the subject of her doctoral thesis at UGent: “Das Freispiel”. “Research on violin technique in the nineteenth century, applied to the German repertoire”. Since September 2019, Ann has been a Doctor of Arts at Ghent University. In 2020, as the first female artistic and business leader in Flanders, she founded le Pavillon de Musique, an ensemble dedicated to the rediscovery of unprecedented baroque repertoire. Since 2008, she has also been concertmaster of the world-renowned Belgian orchestra La Petite Bande conducted by Sigiswald Kuijken. After 50 years, they are still Belgium’s best-known orchestra and thus an important export product. Ann is regarded as its successor, as is her company le Pavillon de Musique, and will thus be the ambassador of early music in Flanders, with all the accompanying national and international appeal. In October 2021, Ann curated the first edition of the Early Music Festival Mechelen. Ann is associated with Klara as a researcher and Early Music specialist and can regularly be heard in reports and interviews.