- Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein (August 25 1918 – October 14 1990) was an American conductor, composer, and pianist. He was the first conductor born in the United States of America to receive world-wide acclaim, and is known for both his conducting of the New York Philharmonic, including the acclaimed "Young People's Concerts" series, and his multiple compositions, including "West Side Story", … - Wynton Marsalis
Jazz musician, trumpeter, composer, bandleader, advocate for the arts, and educator, Wynton Marsalis has helped propel jazz to the forefront of American culture. His prominent position in American culture was solidified in April 1997, when he became the first jazz artist to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music for his work Blood on the Fields , which was commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center. - Philip Glass
Philip Glass (born January 31, 1937) is an Academy Award-nominated American composer. His music is frequently described as "minimalist", though he prefers the term "theater music". He is considered one of the most influential composers of the late-20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public (apart from precursors such as Kurt Weill and Leonard Bernstein), … - Gustavo Dudamel
He's the rock star of classical music. Handsome, talented, charismatic - the usual accolades apply to Gustavo Dudamel , at age 27, incoming music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He guest-conducts the New York Philharmonic Saturday at Tilles... - Joshua Bell
Joshua Bell (born 9 December 1967) is an American Grammy Award-winning violinist. - Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler (July 7, 1860 - May 18, 1911) was a Bohemian-Austrian composer and conductor. Mahler was best known during his own lifetime as one of the leading orchestral and operatic conductors of the day. He has since come to be acknowledged as among the most important post-romantic composers. With the exceptions of an early piano quartet and "Totenfeier", the original tone-poem version of the first movement of the second symphony, … - Yehudi Menuhin
Yehudi Menuhin, Baron Menuhin of Stoke d'Abernon, OM, KBE (April 22, 1916 – March 12, 1999) was an American violinist and conductor who spent most of his performing career in the United Kingdom. Though born in New York City, New York, he would later become a citizen of Switzerland in 1970, and in 1985, Great Britain. - Steve Reich
Stephen Michael Reich (born October 3, 1936) is an American composer. He is a pioneer of minimalism, although his music has increasingly deviated from a purely minimalist style. Reich's innovations include using tape loops to create phasing patterns (examples are his early compositions, "It's Gonna Rain" and "Come Out"), and the use of processes to create and explore musical concepts (for instance, "Pendulum Music" and "Four Organs"). - George Gershwin
George Gershwin (September 26, 1898 - July 11, 1937) was an American composer. He wrote most of his vocal and theatrical works in collaboration with his elder brother, lyricist Ira Gershwin. George Gershwin composed both for Broadway and for the classical concert hall. He also wrote popular songs with success. Many of his compositions have been used on television and in numerous films, and many became jazz standards. - Itzhak Perlman
Perlman began his music career at the Academy of Music in Tel-Aviv, Israel. In 1958, at the age of 13, Itzhak Perlman won an Israeli talent competition. This win made it possible for Perlman to travel to the United States to tour and appear on television. He then stayed in the U.S. and continued his musical training at the Juilliard School in New York City. In 1964, Perlman won a contest among young musicians known as the Leventritt Competition. - Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland was an American composer of concert and film music, as well as an accomplished pianist. Instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, he was widely known as “the dean of American composers.” Copland's music achieved a difficult balance between modern music and American folk styles, and the open, slowly changing harmonies of many of his works are said to evoke the vast American landscape. - Steven Isserlis
Steven Isserlis (born December 19 1958, London) is one of the most prominent living cellists. He is notable for his diverse repertoire, distinctive sound and total command of phrasing. He studied at Oberlin Conservatory of Music and was also highly influneced by the great iconoclast of Russian cello playing, Daniil Shafran. Isserlis plays both as soloist and chamber musician and has rediscovered many previously neglected works. - Daniel Barenboim
Daniel Barenboim (b. November 15, 1942) is a pianist and conductor. He lives in Berlin and holds citizenship in Argentina, Israel, and Spain. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina; his parents were Russian Jews. Barenboim first came to fame as a pianist but now is as well-known as a conductor, and for his work with an orchestra of young Arab and Jewish musicians, based in Israel, called the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, … - Georg Solti
Sir Georg Solti, KBE (pronounced) (21 October, 1912 - 5 September, 1997) was a world-renowned Hungarian-British orchestral and operatic conductor. - Charles Ives
Charles Edward Ives was an American composer of classical music. He is widely regarded as one of the first American classical composers of international significance. Ives' music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives would come to be regarded as one of the "American Originals," a composer working in a uniquely American style, with American tunes woven through his music, … - Isaac Stern
Isaac Stern was one of the finest violin virtuosi of the twentieth century. Born in Kremenetz, Ukraine on July 21, 1920, Isaac Stern was ten months old when his family moved to San Francisco. He received his first music lessons from his mother before enrolling at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 1928. He studied there until 1931, then studied privately with Louis Persinger. - Jascha Heifetz
Jascha Heifetz (December 10, 1987) was a Lithuanian-born American violin virtuoso. - Felix Mendelssohn
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, born and known generally as Felix Mendelssohn (February 3, 1809 - November 4, 1847) was a German composer and conductor of the early Romantic period. Born to a notable Jewish family, being the grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. His work includes symphonies, concertos, oratorios, piano and chamber music. After a long period of relative denigration due to changing musical tastes in the late 19th century, … - Lorin Maazel
Lolin Varencove Maazel is an American conductor, violinist and composer. At twelve he toured America to conduct major orchestras. He made his violin debut at the age of fifteen, and in 1960, he became the first American to conduct at Bayreuth. He was conductor of the Deutsche Oper Berlin from 1965 to 1971 and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1965 to 1975. In 1972, Maazel began his tenure as Music Director at the Cleveland Orchestra. - Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg (the anglicized form of Schönberg - Schoenberg changed the spelling officially when he left Germany and re-converted to Judaism in 1933), (September 13, 1874 - July 13, 1951) was an Austrian and later American composer. Many of Schoenberg's works are associated with the expressionist movements in early 20th-century German poetry and art, and he was among the first composers to embrace atonal motivic development. - James Levine
James Lawrence Levine (b. June 23 1943) is an American orchestral pianist and conductor and most well known as the music director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He is also the current music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. - Mstislav Rostropovich
Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich KBE, (March 27 1927 - April 27 2007), known to close friends as “Slava”, was a cellist and conductor. He was married to the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. He was one of the greatest cellists of the twentieth century. - Pablo Casals
Pau Carles Salvador Casals i Defilló, best known during his professional career as Pablo Casals, was a virtuoso Catalan Spanish cellist and later conductor. He made many recordings throughout his career, of solo, chamber, and orchestral music, also as conductor, but Casals is perhaps best remembered for the recording of the "Bach: Cello Suites" he made from 1936 to 1939. - Vladimir Horowitz
Vladimir Samoylovich Horowitz (1 October 1903 - 5 November 1989) was a Russian-American classical pianist. In his prime, he was considered one of the most distinguished pianists of any age. His technique, use of tone color and the excitement of his playing were legendary. Though sometimes criticized for being overly mannered and showy, he has a huge and passionate following and is widely considered one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century. - Maxim Vengerov
Maxim Vengerov (born August 20, 1974 in Novosibirsk) is a Russian violinist virtuoso of Jewish origin. Vengerov was five when he received his first violin lessons from Galina Turtschaninova and later at the Royal Academy of Music in London (Junior Department). He later studied with the legendary violin teacher Zakhar Bron and was still only ten when he won the Junior Wieniawski Competition in Poland. Recital engagements in Moscow and Leningrad (St.Petersburg) followed, … - Fritz Kreisler
Fritz Kreisler was an Austrian (later American) violinist and composer, one of the most famous violinists of his day. Kreisler was noted for his uniquely sweet tone, and also for his expressive phrasing. He produced a characteristic sound, which was immediately recognizable as his own. His tone and phrasing were associated with the "gemütlich" lifestyle of pre-war Vienna. - Michael Tilson Thomas
Michael Tilson Thomas (b. December 21, 1944), aka MTT, is an American conductor, pianist and composer who directs the San Francisco Symphony. - Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Joshua Sondheim (b. March 22 1930) is widely seen as his generation's leading writer of the stage musical. Described by Frank Rich in the "The New York Times" as "the greatest and perhaps best-known artist in the American musical theater," he is one of the few people to win an Academy Award, multiple Tony Awards (seven, more than any other composer), multiple Grammy Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize. - Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin was an American musician and composer of ragtime music. He remains the best-known ragtime figure and is regarded as one of the three most important composers of classic ragtime, along with James Scott and Joseph Lamb. - Kurt Weill
Kurt Julian Weill (March 2, 1900 - April 3, 1950), was a German, and in his later years German-American, composer active from the 1920s until his death. He was a leading composer for the stage, as well as writing a number of concert works. Over fifty years after his death, his music continues to be performed both in popular and classical contexts. In Weill's lifetime, his work was most associated with the voice of his wife, Lotte Lenya, … - Bruno Walter
Bruno Walter (Bruno Walter Schlesinger) (September 15, 1876 - February 17, 1962) was a German-born conductor and composer. He was born in Berlin, but moved to several countries between 1933 and 1939, finally settling in the United States in 1939. He began using Walter as his surname in 1896, and officially upon naturalising to Austria in 1911. - Colin Davis
Sir Colin Rex Davis, CH, CBE (b. September 25, 1927), is a British Conductor. He was born in Weybridge, Surrey, UK. Davis studied the clarinet at the Royal College of Music in London, where he was barred from taking conducting lessons owing to his lack of ability at the piano. Nonetheless, he formed and often served as conductor of the Kalmar Orchestra with fellow students. In 1952, Davis worked at the Royal Festival Hall, … - Matt Haimovitz
Matt Haimovitz (born 1970) is an Israeli-born cellist now based in the United States and Canada. He is known not only for his outstanding technical and musical skill, but also for his highly unusual concert career and repertoire choices. Haimovitz is as likely to be found playing Bach in a pizzeria or jazz club as in a concert hall, and is as likely to be performing in a small town in the American Midwest or South as in one of the major musical centers. - Gidon Kremer
Gidon Kremer (born February 27, 1947) is a Latvian violinist and conductor. Kremer was born in Riga to parents of German-Jewish origin, his father being a Holocaust survivor. He began to play the violin at the age of four, receiving tuition from his father and his grandfather, who were both professional violinists. He went on to study at the Riga School of Music and with David Oistrakh at the Moscow Conservatory. - Irving Berlin
Irving Berlin (May 11, 1888 - September 22, 1989) was an American composer and lyricist, one of the most prodigious and famous American songwriters in history. Berlin was one of the few Tin Pan Alley/Broadway songwriters who wrote both lyrics and music for his songs. Although he never learned to read music beyond a rudimentary level, he composed over 3,000 songs, many of which ("God Bless America", "White Christmas", "Alexander's Ragtime Band", … - Fritz Reiner
Frederick Martin “Fritz” Reiner was one of the great international conductors of opera and symphonic music in the twentieth century. - Pinchas Zukerman
Pinchas Zukerman is a noted Israeli violinist, violist, and conductor who was appointed Music Director of Canada's National Arts Centre Orchestra in April 1998. Zukerman was born in Tel Aviv. He left for the United States and studied at the Juilliard School. He made his New York début in 1963. From 1980 to 1987 he was the director of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in Minnesota. He married actress Tuesday Weld in 1985 but they divorced in 1998. - Emanuel Ax
Emanuel Ax (born June 8, 1949) is a Jewish-American pianist. Born in Lviv, Ukraine (then a constituent republic of the Soviet Union) to parents Joachim and Hellen Ax, both Nazi concentration camp survivors. Emanuel began to study piano at the age of six and Joachim was his first piano teacher. When he has eight the family moved to Warsaw and then two years later, to Winnipeg, Canada where he continued to study music, … - Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman was an American composer, born in New York City. A key figure in modern music, Feldman's compositions went through several phases. He was a pioneer of aleatoric music and indeterminate music, and in requiring improvisation. His compositions are characterized by their quietness, slowness, and often by their extreme length, especially in his later music. - Gil Shaham
Gil Shaham (born February 19, 1971) is an award-winning violinist of Israeli descent. Born in Urbana, Illinois, he moved to Israel at the age of 2 with his parents, both scientists, Jacob Shaham and Meira Diskin. At age 10, he made debuts with the Jerusalem Symphony and Israel Philharmonic orchestras, and was admitted to Juilliard, where he studied with the famed Dorothy DeLay and Hyo Kang. Both he and his sister, the pianist Orli Shaham, attended Columbia University.
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