Lera Auerbach

Lera Auerbach (Russian: Лера Авербах; born 21 October 1974) is a Russian-born American composer and pianist.
Auerbach was born in Chelyabinsk, a city in the Urals bordering Siberia. She holds degrees in piano and composition from The Juilliard School, where she studied piano with Joseph Kalichstein and composition with Milton Babbitt. She also graduated from the piano soloist program of the Hochschule für Musik Hannover.
Auerbach's compositions have been commissioned and performed by a wide array of artists, orchestras and ballet companies including Gidon Kremer, the Kremerata Baltica, David Finckel, Wu Han, Vadim Gluzman, the Tokyo, Kuss, Parker and Petersen String Quartets, the SWR and NDR symphony orchestras, and the Royal Danish Ballet. Auerbach’s music has also been commissioned by and performed at Caramoor International Music Festival, Lucerne Festival, Lockenhaus Festival, Bremen Musikfest and Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival.

A new commission by The Royal Danish Ballet, to celebrate Hans Christian Andersen's bicentenary, was Lera Auerbach's second collaboration with choreographer John Neumeier. The ballet is a modern rendition of the classic fairy tale The Little Mermaid and was premiered in April 2005 at the then newly-opened Copenhagen Opera House.[2]

Her Double Concerto for Violin, Piano, and Orchestra, Op. 40, was written in 1997, but not premiered until December 15, 2006, in Stuttgart by the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrey Boreyko; the soloists were violinist Vadim Gluzman and pianist Angela Yoffe. The American premiere was on February 13, 2010, by the Fort Wayne Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Andrew Constantine; the soloists were violinist Jennifer Koh and pianist Benjamin Hochman
Auerbach made her Carnegie Hall debut in May 2002, performing her own Suite for Violin, Piano and Orchestra with Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica.[4]

Auerbach has appeared as solo pianist at such venues as the Great Concert Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, Tokyo's Opera City, Lincoln Center, Herkulessaal, Oslo's Konzerthaus, Chicago's Theodore Thomas Orchestra Hall and the Kennedy Center.

In 2007, her Symphony No. 1 "Chimera" received its world premiere by the Düsseldorf Symphony. Other 2007 premieres included Symphony No. 2 "Requiem for a Poet" by Hannover's NDR Radio Philharmonic, as well as A Russian Requiem (on Russian Orthodox sacred texts and poetry by Alexander Pushkin, Gavrila Derzhavin, Mikhail Lermontov, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, Viktor Sosnora and Irina Ratushinskaya) by the Bremen Philharmonic with the Latvian National Choir and the Estonian Opera Boys Choir.

Vienna’s historic Theater an der Wien debuted Auerbach's full length opera based on her original play “Gogol” in November 2011.[5]

Auerbach's a cappella opera The Blind (based on a play by Maurice Maeterlinck) was recently performed in a controversial new production by John La Bouchardiere at Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, New York in July 2013, throughout which the entire audience was blindfolded.[
In 2005 Auerbach received the Paul Hindemith Prize from the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival.[7] In the same year she received the Förderpreis Deutschlandfunk and the Bremer Musikfest Prize; she was composer-in-residence in Bremen. And she is notable for being the youngest composer to be represented by the acclaimed music publisher, Internationale Musikverlage Hans Sikorski GmbH & Co. KG of Hamburg, Germany.[8]

In 2007, she was selected as a member of the forum of Young Global Leaders by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.