Lera Auerbach (born 1973)
Lera Auerbach was born to a Jewish family in the city of Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains of the Soviet Union. She began composing at four years of age but pursued an education and career as a concert pianist. During a 1991 concert tour, she defected to the U.S. She studied piano and composition at Juilliard and comparative literature at Columbia University.
Lera Auerbach has composed two operas (Gogol and The Blind), music for ballet (including The Little Mermaid for the San Francisco Ballet), four symphonies, a piano concerto, four violin concertos (the most recent called Nyx: Fractured Dreams was premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 2017), and ten string quartets, among a variety of other orchestral and chamber music. She continues to perform on piano (YouTube has videos of her playing Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and the music of other Russian composers), she’s published several books of prose and poetry in both Russian and English, and she creates sculptures in bronze. Her website calls her a “renaissance artist for modern times.”
“I was born to do this, to work in art. I had this feeling when I was four and I had it when I came to New York and faced this big test of my character, skills and talent,” she said in an interview with Jewish Woman magazine.
Her orchestral work Icarus was composed in 2006 and revised in 2011:
Despite her many years in the United States, Lera Auerbach’s music often reveals her heritage as a Russian composer. It’s not so much evident in the beautiful eerie and ethereal opening of her String Quartet No. 10, Frozen Dreams from 2020, but wait for it.