Born in Beirut in 1974, Claude Chalhoub began studying the violin at the age of eight and initially played Arabic music. He was awarded a prestigious Queen Elizabeth scholarship by London’s Royal College of Music, chosen to be concertmaster in Daniel Barenboim's "West-Eastern Divanî".

What would you expect of a man who grew up in a family of 11 children? Probably learned to talk loud enough to make himself heard. And if he taught himself to play the violin while a bloody war was going on around him in his native Lebanon and eventually got so good at it that he gained a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Music in London? Must be extraordinarily gifted AND disciplined. What if he got to play with some of the greatest musicians of our times (Daniel Barenboim, Yo-Yo Ma, Michael Brook, to name but a few) in his early twenties? That Michael Brook who produced Sinnead O'Connor and Brian Eno and that Daniel Barenboim of the Chicago Symphonie orchestra? What kind of music IS this? Well you'd better listen to it. It's the kind of music that proofs that there are only two kinds of music - good and bad. That Fairuz is just an other color of Erik Satie. That ears can look for sounds and eyes can listen to images. All you have to do is to stretch out your antennas in every conceivable direction - like Claude Chalhoub.

Claude Chalhoub performs traditional Arab music with great passion worldwide, both alone and with other artists, including the legendary Lebanese singer Fairuz, and was recently invited in the Womad Festival. Renowned producer Michael Brook produced his first album.

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