Born on 22 February 1972 in Fuentes de Satélite, Mexico, Rolando Villazón has firmly established himself as one of the world’s most critically acclaimed tenors of our day. Raised in a suburban area of Greater Mexico City, he was discovered

For every aspiring pianist, Carl Czerny is still a household name. His extensive sets of technical exercises are part of nearly every pianist’s training. Czerny was also the most famous student of Beethoven, and in turn a teacher of Liszt.

On 20 February 1996, while undergoing treatment for abdominal cancer, Tōru Takemitsu died at the age of sixty-five. He had been diagnosed mid-1995, and “by October the disfiguring side-effects of the medical treatments were pronounced.” Takemitsu became increasingly weak and

Gil Shaham is rightfully considered one of the foremost violinists of our time. Born on 19 February 1971 in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, his playing combines inimitable warmth and generosity of spirit. Musical America named him “Instrumentalist of the Year 2012,” and

Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857) has been described as a “dilettante of genius.” His compositions are widely considered the foundation of Russian music, but he primarily wrote them while living and traveling in Western Europe for 23 years. During the 1850s, Glinka

Born on 14 February 1984, Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson grew up in Reykjavík and started playing the piano at an early age under the tutelage of his mother, a piano teacher. He studied at the Juilliard School in New York,

We do know that Richard Wagner died on 13 February 1883 after suffering his final, fatal heart attack. However, there is still much debate as to what triggered that fatal attack. The leading English-language dictionary asserts, “the attack followed an

The son of poor Jewish immigrants, George Gershwin (1898-1937), could hardly have dreamt that his Rhapsody in Blue would single-handedly propel him to world fame. The work was originally titled “American Rhapsody,” but when his brother Ira saw a painting