Isidor Philipp (Philippe) (2 September 1863 – 20 February 1958) was a French pianist, composer, and distinguished pedagogue of Hungarian descent. He was born in Budapest and died in Paris.
Isidor Philipp studied piano under Georges Mathias (a pupil of Frédéric Chopin and Friedrich Kalkbrenner) at the Conservatoire de Paris and won First Prize in piano performance in 1883. Other teachers included Camille Saint-Saëns, Stephen Heller (a pupil of Carl Czerny, one of Beethoven's students) and Theodore Ritter (a pupil of Franz Liszt). At the Conservatoire, he met fellow student Claude Debussy. They remained lifelong friends, and Philipp often played his compositions. After Debussy's death, Philipp was regarded as the leading authority on his piano music. After graduating from the Conservatoire, Philipp commenced a career which took him to various European countries, and he was a regular performer at the Colonne, Lamoureux and Conservatoire concerts in Paris. He was able to hear concerts, recitals or master classes by many of the leading pianists of the day, including Liszt and Anton Rubinstein.
Guiomar Novaes (February 28, 1895 - March 7, 1979) was a Brazilian pianist noted for individuality of tone and phrasing, singing line, and a subtle and nuanced approach to her interpretations. She is widely considered one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century.
Born in São João da Boa Vista (in the area of São Paulo state in Brazil) as one of the youngest children in a very large family, she studied with Antonietta Rudge Miller and Luigi Chiafarelli before she was accepted as a pupil of Isidor Philipp at the Conservatoire de Paris in 1909, That year there were two vacancies for foreign students at the Conservatoire—and 387 applicants. Novaes played for a jury that included Debussy, Fauré and Moszkowski. Her pieces were the Paganini-Liszt Etude in E, Chopin's A flat Ballade and Schumann's Carnaval. She won first place. Debussy wrote a letter afterwards in which he reports his amazement about the little Brazilian girl who came to the platform and, forgetting about public and jury, played with tremendous beauty and complete absorption.
Bernardo Pasquini (7 December 1637 – 22 November 1710) was an Italian composer of opera and church music. A renowned virtuoso keyboard player in his day, he was probably one of the most important Italian composers for harpsichord between Girolamo Frescobaldi and Domenico Scarlatti, having also made substantial contributions to the Roman opera. One of his harpsichord pieces was transcribed for orchestra by Ottorino Respighi for his suite Gli uccelli.
He was born at Massa in Val di Nievole (Tuscany). (There is no evidence that he was related to Ercole Pasquini, the early 17th-century Roman organist.) He was a pupil of Antonio Cesti and Loreto Vittori in 1650. Later he moved to Rome and entered the service of Prince Borghese; subsequently he became organist of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. He enjoyed the protection of Queen Christina of Sweden, in whose honour an opera of his, Dov'è amore è pieta to a libretto by Cristoforo Ivanovich, was produced in 1679.
During Alessandro Scarlatti's second stay in Rome (1703–1708), Pasquini and Arcangelo Corelli were frequently associated with Scarlatti in musical performances, especially in connection with the Academy of Arcadia, of which all three were members. Pasquini died at Rome, and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina.
Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz y Pascual (Spanish pronunciation: [iˈsak alˈβeniθ]) (29 May 1860, Camprodon – 18 May 1909, Cambo-les-Bains) was a Spanish pianist and composer best known for his piano works based on folk music idioms. However, many of his works have been transcribed by Miguel Llobet and others for guitar, and many of his pieces such as Asturias (Leyenda), Granada, Sevilla, Cadiz, Cordoba, Cataluña, and the Tango in D are amongst the most important pieces for classical guitar.
Born in Camprodon, province of Girona, to Ángel Albéniz (a customs official) and his wife Dolors Pascual, Albéniz was a child prodigy who first performed at the age of four. At age seven, after apparently taking lessons from Antoine François Marmontel, he passed the entrance examination for piano at the Paris Conservatoire, but he was refused admission because he was believed to be too young.
Rena Kyriakou (25 February 1917 – August 1994) was a pianist and composer born in Herakleion, Crete, Greece.
Rena Kyriakou revealed an early aptitude for the piano and for composition, and gave her first public performance at the age of six in Athens, performing twelve original piano pieces. She studied first in Vienna under Paul Weingarten and Richard Stöhr and then in Paris under Henri Büsser and Isidor Philipp. At the age of sixteen, she was awarded the first prize for piano at the Conservatoire National de Paris.
Kyriakou followed a dual career as pianist and composer. Her recorded legacy includes the complete piano music of Emmanuel Chabrier, whose works she played with idiomatic flair, and recitals of works by John Field, Joseph Haydn, Enrique Granados and Isaac Albéniz. She recorded a major survey of the piano music of Felix Mendelssohn. Her sound, both in recordings and in concert, was characterised by a wide palette of tone colour, as might be expected of a Philipp pupil. Some of the characteristic tone colour of her recordings is due to her use of a Bösendorfer Imperial Concert grand piano for at least some of them, including her Mendelssohn recordings.