She studied with Roland Greutter, concertmaster of the Hamburg Radio Symphony Orchestra, among others, which helped her win first prize multiple times in Germany's prestigious Jugend musiziert competition. In 2007 she published "Flexible Strings: Five Pieces for Variable String Ensemble", a collection of her arrangements, with Breitkopf & Härtel. In addition to music, Bachmann also studied German and Philosophy. In October 2011 she received the Federal Cross of Merit for her involvement in musical work with children and adolescents. Iris Siegfried, also born 1972 in Hamburg, was also a prize winner of the Jugend musiziert competition. Soon she discovered her vocal talents in performances with various choirs and a cappella groups. Alongside her musical studies, she graduated in 2000 with a degree in law. Since then she has worked as a lawyer for a Hamburg law practice specialising in competition and copyright law. In addition, she took a second degree as a culture manager from the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. As of 2008, she is a lecturer at the at that university. In October 2011, she received the Federal Cross of Merit. Sonja Lena Schmid was born in Tübingen in 1981. She studied cello and chamber music in Hamburg, Amsterdam, the Hague and Lübeck, and has won many awards and grants, such a grant from "Die Zeit", the Dutch Huygens grant, the first prize in the Charles Hennen Concours International Chamber Music Competition and a special prize in the international competition "Schubert and the Music of Modern Times". An avid theatre fan, Schmid has performed in productions at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, and the Munich Biennale. Anne-Monika von Twardowski, born in 1982 in Durban, South Africa, moved to Germany when she was only six years old, where she had her first piano lessons. From 2002 to 2011, she studied piano teaching and performance, and musical arts at the Musikhochschule Lübeck, where Barbara Martini, Jacob Leuschner and David Meier were her teachers. She studied abroad in 2005 and 2006 in Barcelona at the Escola Superior de Música Catalunya where Alan Branch, among others, were her teachers. von Twardowski is passionate about community service, and as of June 2012 she has been involved as a sponsor of the project "Schule mit Courage – Schule ohne Rassismus" (School with courage – School without racism) at the Theodor-Heuss-Schule in Pinneberg near Hamburg.