Conlon Nancarrow (b. October 27, 1912, Texarkana - d. August 10, 1997, Mexico City) was an American-born composer who lived most of his life in Mexico. Nancarrow is remembered almost exclusively for the pieces he wrote for the player piano. He was one of the first composers to use musical instruments as mechanical machines, utilising their capacity to play complex polyrhythms at tempos far beyond human performance ability.
Arcadi Volodos (Russian: Аркадий Володось, Arcadij Volodos) (born February 24, 1972) is a Russian pianist. His first name is sometimes transliterated Arcady or Arkady. Volodos is renowned for his technical mastery of the instrument's virtuosic repertoire; particularly that of Rachmaninoff, Liszt and his recordings of transcriptions by Vladimir Horowitz.
Born in Leningrad in 1972, he began his musical training studying voice, following the example of his parents, who were singers, and later shifted his emphasis to conducting while a student at the Capilla M.
Frederic Rzewski (born Westfield, Massachusetts, 1938) studied music first with Charles Mackey of Springfield, and subsequently with Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Milton Babbitt at Harvard and Princeton Universities. He went to Italy in 1960, where he studied with Luigi Dallapiccola and met Severino Gazzelloni, with whom he performed in a number of concerts, thus beginning a career as a performer of new piano music.
Carlos Cipa is a 22 year old composer/musician residing in Munich (Germany). Carlos discovered his passion for music very early in his life. At the age of 6 he began taking classical piano lessons with various renowned teachers. Ten years later after he started playing drums he became more and more interested in composition and improvisation. In the following years he made lots of experiences in many music styles like jazz, hardcore/punk, indie rock and orchestral music.
Denis Leonidovich Matsuev (born June 11, 1975) is a Russian pianist who won the first prize in the prestigious International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1998 in Moscow. Matsuev has a phenomenal technique, and some consider him to be one of the greatest contemporary pianists.
Moon Ate the Dark is the shadowy moniker of Welsh pianist Anna Rose Carter and Canadian producer Christopher Bailey. Between them, the two London-based transplants make a soundtrack to longing, memory and displacement and inject fresh life into the solo piano subgenre.
Alexander von Schlippenbach (* 1938 in Berlin) is a German jazz pianist and composer.
Schlippenbach started to play piano from the age of 8 and went on to study composition at Cologne under Bernd Alois Zimmermann. While studying he started to play with Manfred Schoof. At the age of 28 he founded the Globe Unity Orchestra.
He produced various recordings and worked for German radio channels. He played with many essential players of the European free jazz community, most notably in the "Alexander von Schlippenbach Trio" with drummer Paul Lovens and saxophonist Evan Parker.
"Helge Lien, jazz pianist and composer, holds a master degree in music from the Norwegian Academy of Music, where Russian pianist Misha Alperin was an inspiring mentor and teacher of improvisation. The core of Lien
Sophie Hutchings is Australian pianist and composer. Having begun playing piano young growing up in a musical family, Sophie started writing properly in her teens. Sophie
The rising pianist whose Beethoven recordings for EMI Classics have received critical acclaim from The New York Times, BBC Music and The Telegraph, South Korean breathtaking performer HJ Lim, is becoming a classical music phenomenon as we speak. In 2010, her extraordinary decision to encompass in live concerts the complete Beethoven piano sonatas, performed in Paris in August 2010, in over eight consecutive days, created a sensation in the classical music world.