Peter Borbe

Carreno received early lessons from her father, who is also credited for developing her strong sense of self-criticism, to which she attributed her success. She also studied with Gottschalk and later with Anton Rubinstein. She was very successful in Germany, where she lived for over 30 years. Most of her compositions were for piano, although an interest in strings motivated her to write a String Quartet in b minor. Carreno was married four times, and together with her second husband, Tagliapietra, she organized, conducted and sang in an opera company in Venezuela. Her third husband greatly influenced her style, changing her performances from the tempestuous to the thoughtful.

Dame Myra Hess was one of the best-known and most beloved of British pianists. She was a pupil of Julian Pascal and Orlando Morgan. At 12 she earned a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music and became a pupil of Tobias Matthay, whom she viewed as her primary teacher. She debuted at the age of 17 in Beethoven's Fourth Concerto, with Thomas Beecham conducting. In a departure for pianists of her era she took a special interest in chamber music, including participating in a piano duo with her cousin Irene Scharrer.

If Chopin "invented" the mazurka, it is certain that, in the same way, Grieg "invented" the lyrical piece, managing to synthesize Norwegian folk music with the forms and conventions of the German tradition. Recording Grieg's complete Lyrical Pieces, the first volume of which is here, was a profound pleasure for pianist Peter Donohoe, who has long been in love with Grieg's singular music.

If Chopin "invented" the mazurka, it is certain that, in the same way, Grieg "invented" the lyrical piece, managing to synthesize Norwegian folk music with the forms and conventions of the German tradition. Recording Grieg's complete Lyrical Pieces, the first volume of which is here, was a profound pleasure for pianist Peter Donohoe, who has long been in love with Grieg's singular music.

Italo-German composer Ferruccio Busoni was a titanic piano virtuoso and an architect of European modernism. Best known for his transcriptions of J.S. Bach and for his Piano Concerto, Fantasia Contrappuntistica, and opera Doktor Faust, Busoni revolutionized piano technique and opened up new harmonic concepts within boundaries of functional harmony. Busoni's idea of junge klassizität (renewed classicality) served as a building block for neo-classicism and his book remains influential.

In the 1970s, Peter Allen gained recognition both as a composer of romantic ballads such as "I Honestly Love You" and "Don't Cry Out Loud," and, contrastingly, as a flamboyant stage performer. He learned to play the piano and began entertaining people at the pub in his small Australian hometown when he was still a child. By 1959, he was in Sydney, where he became a last-minute replacement in a duo appearing on the television show Australian Bandstand with guitarist and singer Chris Bell.

Conductor Peter Phillips is one of the leading lights in the world of British choral music, best known as the director of the prolific and durable group The Tallis Scholars. He is also a noted scholar, radio and television presenter who has done much to popularize Renaissance music, a music label founder and executive, and an educator. Phillips was born on October 15, 1953, in Southampton, England. He studied at St. John's College, Oxford University, as an organ scholar. By the time he graduated in 1975, he had gained a grounding not only in choral and organ music but in music history, studying with two of the leading British musicologists of the day, Denis Arnold and David Wulstan. In 1973, Phillips assembled a group of singers from Oxford and Cambridge to perform Renaissance music and named them The Tallis Scholars in honor of English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis. The term "Scholars" was not merely fanciful, for the singers were all choral scholars from the various colleges of the two universities. Phillips held teaching posts at Oxford, the Royal College of Music, and Trinity College of Music, but the activities of The Tallis Scholars expanded after they established themselves formally in 1978.

As a composer, she has explored various genres of music for film. She composed the soundtrack for the promotional video of the new building for the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Malaga created by the architect Eduardo Pérez Gómez. She has also composed a piece for piano quintet for Lynn University (Florida), which will be premiered in both the USA and Italy.

Ignaz (or Ignacy) Friedman was one of the most important pianists from the early decades of the twentieth century, ranking in stature with such keyboard stalwarts as Josef Hofmann, Sergey Rachmaninov, Josef Lhevinne, and Leopold Godowsky. His contemporaries were among his greatest admirers: Horowitz, a friend but generally taciturn in offering praise to rivals, was said to have assessed Friedman's technique as stronger than his own. Friedman was also a composer with a fairly substantial output, mainly of piano works or of chamber music involving the piano. He also transcribed many compositions for his instrument and edited Chopin's complete piano works, as well as selected ones by Beethoven, Liszt, and others.

Constantly in search of eclectic and meaningful programmes, the soprano Anna Prohaska here celebrates ‘life in death’.