- George Szell
George Szell (June 7, 1897 - July 30, 1970), originally György Széll or Georg Szell, was a Hungarian-born American conductor and composer. He is remembered today for his long and successful tenure as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, and for the recordings of the standard classical repertoire he made in Cleveland and with other orchestras. Szell came to Cleveland in 1946 to take over a respected, but undersized, …
- Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez (b. March 26 1925) is a French composer and conductor of contemporary classical music.
- 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.
- Leonard Slatkin
Leonard Slatkin (born September 1 1944) is an American conductor. His father was the violinist, conductor and founder of the Hollywood String Quartet, Felix Slatkin, and his mother was Eleanor Aller, the cellist with the quartet. His brother, Frederick Zlotkin, is a cellist. He studied at Indiana University and Los Angeles City College before attending the Juilliard School where he studied conducting under Jean Paul Morel. His conducting debut came in 1966, and in 1968, …
- 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, …
- Leon Fleisher
Leon Fleisher (born July 23, 1928) is an American pianist and conductor. He was born in San Francisco, California, where he started studying the piano at age 4. He made his public debut at age 8 and played with the New York Philharmonic under Pierre Monteux at 16. He studied with Artur Schnabel. He made a memorable series of recordings with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra before losing the use of his right hand due to focal dystonia.
- Riccardo Chailly
Riccardo Chailly (born February 20, 1953) is an Italian conductor. He started his career as an opera conductor and gradually extended his repertoire to encompass symphonic music
- John Eliot Gardiner
Sir John Eliot Gardiner CBE (born April 20, 1943, Fontmell Magna, Dorset, England) is an English conductor. He founded the Monteverdi Choir (1966), the English Baroque Soloists (1978) and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (1990). Gardiner recorded over 250 albums with these and other musical ensembles, most of which have been published by Deutsche Grammophon and Philips Classics.
- Robert Shaw
Robert Shaw was an American conductor most famous for his work with his namesake Chorale, with the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. Shaw received 14 Grammy awards, four ASCAP awards for service to contemporary music, the first Guggenheim Fellowship ever awarded to a conductor, the Alice M. Ditson Conductor's Award for Service to American Music; the George Peabody Medal for outstanding contributions to music in America, …
- Christoph von Dohnányi
Christoph von Dohnányi is a German conductor, and founding conductor of the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne.
- Mitsuko Uchida
(born December 20, 1948) is a classical pianist.
- Jaime Laredo
Jaime Laredo (born June 7, 1941 in Cochabamba, Bolivia) is a violinist and conductor. Currently the conductor and Music Director of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, he began his musical career when he was five years old. In 1948 he came to North America and took lessons from Antonio DeGrass. He also studied with Frank Houser before moving to Cleveland, Ohio, to study under Josef Gingold in 1953.
- Erich Leinsdorf
Erich Leinsdorf (Erich Landauer) (February 4, 1912 - September 11, 1993) was an Austrian-born American conductor. He performed and recorded with leading orchestras and opera companies throughout the United States and Europe, earning a reputation for exacting standards as well as an acerbic personality. He also published books and essays on musical matters.
- Matthias Bamert
Matthias Bamert Swiss composer and conductor. Matthias Bamert studied music in his native Switzerland, as well as in Darmstadt and Paris with Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen; their influences can be detected in his own compositions from the 1970s. He spent from 1965 to 1969 as principal oboist with the Salzburg Mozart Orchestra, but then switched to conducting.
- Janine Jansen
Janine Jansen (born in Utrecht, 1978) is a Dutch violinist. Her father and brother are also musicians. She began to study the violin at age 6. She studied with Coosje Wijzenbeek, Philipp Hirshhorn, and Boris Belkin. Jansen appeared as soloist with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland in 2001, where she performed the Brahms Violin Concerto. She opened the BBC Proms in 2005.
- James Conlon
James Conlon (born 1950) is a prominent American conductor. He is known for both his symphonic and operatic work. Born in Manhattan and raised in Queens, Conlon was one of five children born into a Catholic union household led by an Irish father and a German-Italian mother. Although his parents were not wealthy, they shared a vigorous belief in self-education and passionately supported his intellectual and musical aspirations.
- Lynn Harrell
Lynn Harrell (born January 30, 1944) is an American classical cellist. Harrell was born in New York of musician parents; his father was the distinguished baritone Mack Harrell and his mother, Marjorie Fulton, was a violinist. At the age of eight he decided to learn to play the cello. When Lynn was 12, his family moved to Dallas, Texas, where Lynn studied with Lev Aronson.
- Peter Serkin
Peter Serkin (born July 24, 1947) is a distinguished American pianist. He was born in New York City and is the son of one of the world's leading pianists, Rudolf Serkin, and grandson of the legendary violinist Adolf Busch, whose daughter Irene had married Rudolf Serkin. (Peter was given the middle name Adolf in honor of his grandfather, according to "Rudolf Serkin: A life" by Stephen Lehmann and Marion Farber, Oxford, 2003, p. 96).
- Jahja Ling
Jahja Ling is an orchestra conductor. He is of Chinese descent and is now an American citizen. He began to play the piano at age 4 and studied at the Yayasan Pendidikan Musik School of Music. At age 17, he won the Jakarta Piano Competition and, one year later, was awarded a Rockefeller grant to attend The Juilliard School. There he completed a master's degree and studied piano with Mieczyslaw Munz and conducting with John Nelson.
- Alisa Weilerstein
American cellist Alisa Weilerstein has attracted widespread attention for playing that combines a natural virtuosic command and technical precision with impassioned musicianship. At 26 years old, she is already a veteran on the classical music scene having performed with the nation's top orchestras, given recitals in music capitals throughout the U.S. and Europe, and having regularly appeared at prestigious festivals.
- Lukas Foss
BPO Music Director: 1963-71 As a fifteen-year-old prodigy Lukas Foss arrived in America in 1937 where he enrolled at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music. By that time he had already been composing for eight years, with lessons in his native Berlin with his first piano teacher, Julius Herford . After his family fled Nazi Germany in 1933 Foss studied in Paris with Lazare Levy , Noel Gallon and Felix Wolfes , and advanced flute with Louis Moyse .
- Robert Casadesus
Robert Casadesus was a French pianist and composer. He was born in Paris and studied at the Conservatoire there with Louis Diémer, taking a "premier prix" in 1913 and the Prix Diémer in 1920. From 1922 he collaborated with Ravel on a project to create piano rolls of a number of works as well as sharing concert platforms with the composer in France, Spain and England. As a soloist he toured widely and frequently performed with his wife, the pianist Gaby Casadesus, …
- John Nelson
John Wilton Nelson (born 6 December 1941, San Jose, Costa Rica, of American parents) is an American conductor. Nelson studied at Wheaton College, and later at the Juilliard School of Music with Jean Morel. Nelson was Music Director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra from 1976 to 1987. Nelson made two commercial recordings with the Indianapolis Symphony, of music by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and Charles Martin Loeffler, for the New World Records label.
- John Mack
John Mack was a renowned American oboist. Born in Somerville, New Jersey, Mack attended the Juilliard School of Music, studying oboe with Harold Gomberg and Bruno Labate and then at the Curtis Institute of Music with Marcel Tabuteau, the longtime principal oboe of the Philadelphia Orchestra. His first professional experience was with the Sadler Wells Ballet's American tour in 1951-1952. Afterwards he was appointed principal oboist of the New Orleans Symphony, …
- Alan Gilbert
Alan Gilbert is an American conductor, born in New York in 1967. His father, Michael Gilbert, is a retired violinist from the New York Philharmonic, while his mother, Yoko Takabe, continues to play as a member of the orchestra. Growing up in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, he attended the Ethical Culture School and Fieldston. Gilbert studied the violin and viola at various institutions such as Harvard University, …
- Leonard Rose
Leonard Rose (July 27, 1918 - November 16, 1984) is considered one of the greatest American cellists of the 20th century. Born in Washington, D.C., Rose took lessons from Walter Grossman, Frank Miller and Felix Salmond and after completing his studies at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music at age 20, he joined Arturo Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra, and almost immediately became associate principal.
- Charles Wuorinen
Charles Wuorinen is an American composer. Co-founder of The Group for Contemporary Music, Wuorinen writes serial instrumental music. Some of his pieces are influenced by fractal geometry and Benoît Mandelbrot, while his later works feature some tonal relationships. In 1970, Wuorinen was the youngest composer ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, for the electronic piece "Time's Encomium". He is also the author of "Simple Composition", ISBN 0-938856-06-5, …
- Paavo Berglund
Paavo Berglund (born: Helsinki, 14 April 1929) is a Finnish conductor. He studied the violin and joined the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (Finnish RSO) in 1949. In 1952 he co-founded the Helsinki CO. He was chief conductor of the Finnish RSO (1962-72) and in 1965 gave Sibelius centenary concerts with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, becoming principal conductor in 1972.
- Ivan Moravec
Ivan Moravec is a Czech concert pianist whose performing and recording career, spanning nearly half a century, has gained him a world-wide following. A life-long resident of Prague, Moravec's first musical interest was in opera, which he attended as a child with his father. He also recalls turning pages as his father, an amateur pianist and singer, sight-read and sang through opera scores.
- Nikolai Sokoloff
Nikolai Sokoloff (1886-1965), was a Russian-American conductor and violinist. He was born in Kiev and studied at Yale. He started his career as a violinist. From 1916 to 1917 he was musical director of the San Francisco People's Philharmonic Orchestra, where he insisted on including women in his orchestra and paying them the same as men. He became the first musical director of the Cleveland Orchestra in 1918 where he remained until 1932.
- Peter Lieberson
Peter Lieberson came to prominence in the mid-1980s with the Piano Concerto and Drala, two major commissions from the Boston Symphony, with whom he still enjoys a fruitful collaboration. Of profound influence on his music has been his practice of Tibetan Buddhism. Since 1980 many of his works have been inspired by Buddhist themes such as King Gesar (1991) and the opera Ashoka's Dream (1997), both from a series of works based on the lives of enlightened rulers.
- Greg Sandow
Greg Sandow is an American music critic and composer. For many years, he was best known as a critic, both of classical music and pop. But more recently he moved journalism to a back burner, revived a composing career that he abandoned in the 1980s, and began writing and speaking about the future of classical music, a subject that has become his specialty. As a critic, Sandow wrote for "The Village Voice" in the 1980s, …
- Josef Gingold
Josef Gingold was born in Brest-Litovsk, Russian Empire and emigrated to the United States in 1920 where he studied violin with Vladimir Graffman in New York City and then moved to Belgium for several years to study with master violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. In 1937 he won a spot in the NBC Symphony Orchestra with Arturo Toscanini as its conductor, then was the concertmaster (and occasional soloist) of the Detroit Orchestra, …
- Jennifer Koh
Jennifer Koh is an American Violinist, born to Korean parents. She is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory as well as the Curtis Institute and was silver medalist in the 1994 Tchaikovsky Competition. Ms. Koh has performed extensively with such orchestras as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Czech Philharmonic, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Saint Louis Symphony, and Cleveland Orchestra and is an advocate of music education for children.
- Orli Shaham
Orli Shaham (born 5 November 1975) is an American pianist, born in Jerusalem, Israel, the daughter of two scientists, Jacob Shaham and Meira Diskin. Her brother is the violinist Gil Shaham. She is a graduate of the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York, and of Columbia University. She also studied at the Juilliard School, beginning in its Pre-College Division and continuing while a student at Columbia.
- Alban Gerhardt
Alban Gerhardt (1969-) is a German cellist. He has performed with many internationally known orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
- Julius Baker
Julius Baker (September 23, 1915 - August 8, 2003) was one of the foremost American orchestral flute players. He was well known as a teacher and served as a faculty member at the Juilliard School, Curtis Institute of Music, and Carnegie Mellon University. He made many recordings with conductors such as Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein, and played second flute with the Cleveland Orchestra from 1937-1941.
- Todd Wilson
Todd Wilson is a notable American organist. He is the chairman of the organ department at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and is organ curator of the Cleveland Orchestra.
- Julian Anderson
Julian Anderson (born April 6, 1967 in London) is a British composer, and writer on music. He studied at Westminster School, with John Lambert at the Royal College of Music, with Alexander Goehr at Cambridge University, and with Tristan Murail. From 2000 to 2004 he was Head of Composition at the Royal College of Music, and from 2001-5 he was Composer-in-Association of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
- Ivan Davis
Ivan Davis (born February 4, 1932 in Electra, Texas) is an American classical pianist. He received his bachelor's degree in music from North Texas State University, and an Artist's Diploma from the Santa Cecilia Academy in Rome. Davis studied under Silvio Scionti, Carlo Zecchi and played regularly for Vladimir Horowitz. He debuted at New York City's Town Hall in 1959. Davis made his international debut at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto.