The Trust
The Charity
The Menuhin Competition is operated by the Menuhin Competition Trust, a UK-registered charity, its Board and a small and dedicated team of London-based staff. It has close links to the Menuhin family with Yehudi Menuhin’s daughter Zamira Menuhin-Benthall as its Life Patron and Menuhin’s grandson Aaron as Trustee.
The Trust
President – Joji Hattori
Joji Hattori is one of the leading Japanese musicians of his generation and has enjoyed a very varied career as a musician, firstly as a concert violinist, an activity which has developed into directing chamber orchestras, conducting symphony orchestras and finally operas. He started playing the violin at the age of five and studied with Yehudi Menuhin and Vladimir Spivakov. Joji won the Senior 1st Prize in the 1989 edition of the Menuhin Competition.
Chairman – H.S.H. Prince Etienne d’Arenberg
Etienne has over 25 years’ experience in private banking and private equity, as former Limited Partner at Mirabaud Group, investor for his own family office and current co-founder of Spring Equity Partners Ltd, a newly formed Swiss-based investment office providing wealth management services and co-investment opportunities to a select group of large families.
Etienne is also currently active in private equity investments, mainly early stage, and is a board member or chairs several active businesses (finance, agriculture) and charity boards (European historic think tank, architecture, ballet and music), in Switzerland, Europe and United Kingdom. He holds a MSc (Mgt) from Boston University and graduated from the Hotel Management School of Lausanne. He’s a music lover and an enthusiastic rider, skier and mountaineer. He lives in London with his wife Andrienne and their two adult daughters.
Trustee – Duncan Greenland CBE
Venture capital investor, member of the Franco-British Council and Chair of Trustees of the Menuhin Competition Trust until 2018.
Trustee – Jantiene T. Klein Roseboom van der Veer
Jantiene has a portfolio career consisting of executive and non-executive directorships in the private, public and third sector. She has degrees in business administration and landscape architecture, and is an alumnus of Harvard Business School and London Business School. She has held senior executive level positions with global responsibilities for marketing, corporate strategy, M&A, finance and capital markets in major companies, and was a partner of a leading capital markets advisory firm. She is MD of a landscape architectural practice and her current non-executive appointments include being Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Henri Moerel Foundation and Member of the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, the Menuhin Competition Trust and Bury Court Opera, reflecting her interests in the arts and music as a universal language, science and conservation, education and supporting a younger generation.
Trustee – Aaron Menuhin
Aaron Menuhin, grandson of Yehudi Menuhin, was born in Avignon in Southern France in 1982. He initially studied painting and drawing at the New York Studio School where he met his now wife who had studied opera singing at Julliard. He then put his artistic career on hold and completed an Msc in International Management with China at SOAS, a conversion law course (GDL) and LLM with BPP and co-founded the law firm Fairhurst Menuhin & Co in 2013 after working in private equity in Germany. He specialises in mergers and acquisitions. He joined the board of Trustees of the Menuhin Competition in 2015.
He has four children between the ages of 1 and 9 years. In the very little spare time he has left Aaron still occasionally paints. His family live in Munich and he currently commutes to the UK on a bi-weekly basis.
Trustee – Catriona Syed
Catriona is a solicitor who specialises in tax planning, trusts, philanthropy, charities and the resolution of potentially contentious issues arising out of wills, trusts and co-ownership of property for private clients and charities. She is a member of the Society of Trusts and Estates Practitioners and is regarded as a leader in her field by professional directories.