Lera Auerbach is a prodigiously talented pianist and composer. Her compositions have been commissioned by an extensive group of performers and ensembles. She has also taken up conducting and is a poet and visual artist. Auerbach was born on October 21, 1973, in the city of Chelyabinsk, located to the east of the Ural mountain range, near the Siberian border. Auerbach's promise at the keyboard was discovered early, and she made her debut as a pianist with an orchestra at the age of eight. At the age of 12, Auerbach composed an opera that proved a cause celèbre when it was staged, and a touring version of the work was seen throughout the Soviet Union. When Auerbach was 17, she was sent to the U.S. on a concert tour but decided to defect to the West; she was one of the last Soviet artists to do so. Auerbach continued at Juilliard, where she studied composition with Milton Babbitt and piano with Joseph Kalichstein. Auerbach is also recognized as an accomplished poet. Her first volume of verse, Sorokolunie ("Forty Moons"), contained poems that dated back to the time she was 11; issued in 1995, it earned her the distinction of "Poet of the Year" from the International Pushkin Society. Although her music is respected in Russia, her literary work is better known there, with certain verses already established as part of the curriculum in modern Russian language studies in her homeland. In 2000, Auerbach served the first of two artist residencies at the Baden-Baden home of Johannes Brahms at the behest of the International Brahms Society, and in 2001, she was invited by Gidon Kremer as a guest artist at the Lockenhaus Festival; there, 16 of her works were performed. In 2002, Auerbach completed her piano studies with Einar Steen-Nøkleberg at the Hannover Höchschüle für Musik and in 2003, Vadim Gluzman and Angela Yoffe recorded the first all-Auerbach program for BIS, Lera Auerbach: 24 Preludes for Violin and Piano. This was well-received, and since then, BIS has continued to release albums of Auerbach's music, including one played by Auerbach herself, Lera Auerbach Plays Her Preludes and Dreams, in 2006. This should not be taken to mean that her work is a cottage industry, as Auerbach's music has been widely commissioned and taken on by performers from around the globe, including the Peterson Quartett, David Finckel, Wu Han, and the Royal Danish Ballet. Gogol, her first full-length opera, based on her own play, was premiered in 2011. Auerbach's catalog takes in many different genres, including ballets, symphonies, concertos, instrumental and vocal chamber music, and piano music. Her Violin Concerto No. 4 ("NYx: Fractured Dreams") was premiered in 2017 by conductor Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic (who commissioned the work), with Leonidas Kavakos as the soloist. In 2019, as the piano soloist, she premiered her Symphony No. 4 ("Arctica"), with Teddy Abrams leading the Washington Chorus and National Symphony and Oslo Philharmonic Orchestras. Auerbach and Marilyn Nelson teamed up to write the children's book A Is for Oboe: The Orchestra's Alphabet, which was published in 2021. The following year, a recording of her works for violin and piano was issued by the Avita Duo on the Hänssler Classic label. ~ Uncle Dave Lewis & Keith Finke, Rovi