About Lera Auerbach

Lera Auerbach (Russian: Лера Авербах; b. October 21, 1973 in Chelyabinsk, Russia) is one of the most widely performed composers of her generation. She was born in Chelyabinsk, a city in the Urals bordering Siberia. Auerbach continues the tradition of virtuoso pianist-composers of the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the youngest composer on the roster of the international music publishing company Hans Sikorski well-known as a home to Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina and Giya Kancheli. Auerbach's music is characterized by stylistic freedom and juxtaposition of tonal and atonal musical language. 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. Ms. Auerbach's music has been presented at Carnegie Hall each season since then. In 2005, she was awarded the Hindemith Prize by the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival in Germany. 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 (Hannover) Symphony Orchestras, NDR Hamburg and the Royal Danish Ballet. Auerbach's music has also been commissioned and performed by leading Festivals throughout the world including Caramoor, Lucerne, Lockenhaus, Bremen and Schleswig-Holstein. Auerbach has appeared as solo pianist at such venues as the Bolshoi Saal of the Moscow Conservatory, Tokyo's Opera City, New York's Lincoln Center, Munich's Herkulessaal, Oslo's Konzerthaus, Chicago's Symphony Hall and Washington's Kennedy Center. Auerbach 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 Hannover Hochschule für Musik. 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 successfully in April 2005. In 2005 Auerbach received the Paul Hindemith Prize from the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. In the same year she received the Förderpreis Deutschlandfunk and the Bremer Musikfest Prize; she is currently composer in residence at Bremer. 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 by the Bremen Philharmonic with the Latvian National Choir and the Estonian Opera Boys Choir. Auerbach is also a writer. She has published six volumes of poetry and prose in Russian. In 2007, she was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.