Kirill Petrenko, currently chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, was born on 11 February in Omsk, a city in Siberia “that made its living from the arms industry and petrochemicals.” Petrenko recalls that it was a closed city for foreigners,

Combining phenomenal technical brilliance and dramatic outfits, Yuja Wang is one of the hottest tickets on the classical music stage. Born in Beijing, China, on 10 February 1987, Yuja Wang comes from an artistic family. Her mother, Zhai Jieming, is

Francis Poulenc: La voix humaine In the early 1920’s, Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) had been the unofficial spokesman for a group of six composers emphasizing directness, simplicity, clarity and humor. “Les Six,” comprising George Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud,

After the enormous success of Aida in 1871, Giuseppe Verdi decided on an early retirement. He still had things to say, but as a composer who had been at the forefront of Italian musical taste for two decades, he now

On 3 February 1809, Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg into a highly prominent Jewish family. His grandfather Moses Mendelssohn was the “preeminent Jewish philosopher of the Enlightenment in Germany, who had argued for religious tolerance and the assimilation of

After the 19-year-old Jascha Heifetz played his London debut, Georg Bernard Shaw wrote to him, “If you provoke a jealous God by playing with such superhuman perfection, you will die young. I earnestly advise you to play something badly every

Born on 1 February 1973, the Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov began his musical studies at the Moscow Central Music School at the age of 6. Although he never considered himself a child prodigy, he did play Rachmaninoff’s first piano concerto

Franz Schubert was born in the early afternoon of 31 January 1797 in a one-room apartment in a house called “The Red Crab”, then located in the district of the “Himmelpfortgrund,” an area northwest of the bustling and overcrowded center