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• 
  Aaron Copland
  Aaron Copland ( /ˌærən ˈkoʊplənd/; November 14, 1900 – December 2, 1990) was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later in his career a conductor of his own and other American music. He was instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, and is often referred to as "the Dean of American Composers". He is best known to the public for the works he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s in a deliberately more accessible style than his earlier pieces, including the ballets Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid, Rodeo and his Fanfare for the Common Man. The open, slowly changing harmonies of many of his works are archetypical of what many people consider to be the sound of American music, evoking the vast American landscape and pioneer spirit. However, he wrote music in different styles at different periods of his life: his early works incorporated jazz or avant-garde elements whereas his later music incorporated serial techniques. In addition to his ballets and orchestral works, he produced music in many other genres including chamber music, vocal works, opera and film scores.
  
  wn.com/Aaron_Copland
• Adolph Deutsch
  Adolph Deutsch (20 October 1897 – 1 January 1980) was a composer, conductor and arranger. He won Oscars for his background music for Oklahoma! (1955), and for conducting the music for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) and Annie Get Your Gun (1950). The London, England-born Deutsch was also nominated for The Band Wagon (1953) and the 1951 film version of Show Boat, for which he conducted the orchestra. For Broadway and Hollywood, he conducted, composed and arranged music, but did not write songs, not even for the Broadway shows on which he worked. In addition to his music for westerns and his conducting of the scores for musicals, Deutsch also composed for films noir, including The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), The Maltese Falcon (1941), and Nobody Lives Forever (1946), and the Billy Wilder comedies The Apartment (1960), and Some Like It Hot (1959).
  In 1914, Deutsch was "a Buffalo movie house musician", accompanying silent films.
  Deutsch began his composing career on Broadway in the 1920s and 1930s before working for Hollywood films beginning in the late 1930s. For Broadway, he orchestrated Irving Berlin's As Thousands Cheer and George and Ira Gershwin's Pardon My English.
  
  wn.com/Adolph_Deutsch
• Adolph Green
  Adolph Green (December 2, 1914  – October 23, 2002) was an American lyricist and playwright who, with long-time collaborator Betty Comden, penned the screenplays and songs for some of the most beloved movie musicals, particularly as part of Arthur Freed's production unit at MGM, during the genre's heyday. Many people thought the pair were married; they were not, but they shared a unique comic genius and sophisticated wit that enabled them to forge a six-decade-long partnership that produced some of Hollywood and Broadway's greatest hits.
  Green was born in The Bronx to Hungarian-Jewish immigrants Daniel and Helen Weiss Green. After high school, he worked as a runner on Wall Street while he tried to make it as an actor. He met Comden through mutual friends in 1938 while she was studying drama at New York University. They formed a troupe called the Revuers, which performed at the Village Vanguard, a club in Greenwich Village. Among the members of the company was a young comedian named Judy Tuvim, who later changed her name to Judy Holliday, and Green's good friend, a young musician named Leonard Bernstein, frequently accompanied them on the piano. The act's success earned them a movie offer and the Revuers traveled west in hopes of finding fame in Greenwich Village, a 1944 movie starring Carmen Miranda and Don Ameche, but their roles were so small they barely were noticed, and they quickly returned to New York.
  
  wn.com/Adolph_Green
• Alan Jay Lerner
  Alan Jay Lerner (August 31, 1918 – June 14, 1986) was an American lyricist and librettist. In collaboration with Frederick Loewe, he created some of the world's most popular and enduring works of musical theatre for both the stage and on film. He won three Tony Awards and three Academy Awards, among other honors.
  Born in New York City, he was the son of Edith Adelson Lerner and Joseph Jay Lerner, whose brother, Samuel Alexander Lerner, was founder and owner of the Lerner Stores, a chain of dress shops. One of Lerner's cousins was the radio comedian/television game show panelist Henry Morgan. Alan Jay Lerner was educated at Bedales School in England, The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut, (where he wrote "The Choate Marching Song") and Harvard. He attended both Camp Androscoggin and Camp Greylock. At both Choate and Harvard, Lerner was a classmate of John F. Kennedy; at Choate they had worked together on the yearbook staff. Like Cole Porter at Yale and Richard Rodgers at Columbia, his career in musical theater began with his collegiate contributions, in Lerner's case to the annual Harvard Hasty Pudding musicals. During the summers of 1936 and 1937, Lerner studied at Juilliard. While attending Harvard, he lost his sight in his left eye due to an accident in the boxing ring. In 1957, Lerner and Leonard Bernstein, another of Lerner's college classmates, collaborated on "Lonely Men of Harvard," a tongue-in-cheek salute to their alma mater.
  
  wn.com/Alan_Jay_Lerner
• 
  Alexander Nevsky
  Alexander Nevsky (Russian:  Алекса́ндр Яросла́вич Не́вский​ (help·info), Aleksandr Yaroslavich Nevskiy; pronounced [ɐlʲɪˈksandr jɪrɐˈslavʲɪtɕ ˈnʲefskʲɪj]; 30 May 1220 – 14 November 1263, proclaimed Saint of the Russian Orthodox Church by Metropolite Macarius in 1547) was the Prince of Novgorod and Grand Prince of Vladimir during some of the most trying times in the city's history. Commonly regarded as the key figure of medieval Rus, Alexander was the grandson of Vsevolod the Big Nest and rose to legendary status on account of his military victories over the German and Swedish invaders while employing collaborationist policies towards the powerful Golden Horde.
  From Tales of the Life and Courage of the Pious and Great Prince Alexander found in the Second Pskovian Chronicle, circa 1260–1280, comes one of the first known references to the Great Prince:
  "By the will of God, prince Alexander was born from the charitable, people-loving, and meek the Great Prince Yaroslav, and his mother was Theodosia. As it was told by the prophet Isaiah: 'Thus sayeth the Lord: I appoint the princes because they are sacred and I direct them.' "... He was taller than others and his voice reached the people as a trumpet, and his face was like the face of Joseph, whom the Egyptian Pharaoh placed as next to the king after him of Egypt. His power was a part of the power of Samson and God gave him the wisdom of Solomon ... this Prince Alexander: he used to defeat but was never defeated ..."
  
  wn.com/Alexander_Nevsky
• Alfred Wallenstein
  Alfred Wallenstein (October 7, 1898 – February 8, 1983) was an American cellist and conductor, born in Chicago, Illinois. At the age of 17, he joined the San Francisco Symphony as a cellist. He subsequently played cello with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra before becoming principal cello of the New York Philharmonic under Arturo Toscanini in 1929. He frequently performed with these orchestras as a soloist.
  Toscanini, also a cellist, advised Wallenstein to become a conductor. He conducted the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and then conducted frequently on the radio. From 1943 to 1956, he was music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He later taught at the Juilliard School in New York, where he died in 1983 at age 84.
  In 1941, Wallenstein was given a personal Peabody Award for Outstanding Entertainment in Music.
  He was a descendant of Albrecht von Wallenstein.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Alfred_Wallenstein
• André Previn
  André George Previn, KBE (born Andreas Ludwig Priwin; April 6, 1929) is a German-American pianist, conductor, and composer. He is considered one of the most versatile musicians in the world and is the winner of four Academy Awards for his film work and ten Grammy Awards for his recordings.
  Previn was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Charlotte (née Epstein) and Jack Previn, who was a lawyer, judge, and music teacher. He is said to be "a distant relative of" the composer Gustav Mahler. However, In a pre-concert public interview at the Lincoln Center, in May 2012, Previn laughed at the suggestion that he is related to Mahler. The year of his birth is uncertain. Whilst most published reports give 1929, Previn himself has stated that 1930 is his birth year. This situation is a consequence of his the family losing Previn's birth certificate when they left Germany in 1938.^{[citation needed]} His elder brother was director Steve Previn.^{[citation needed]} The Previn family, which was Jewish,^{[citation needed]} emigrated to the United States in 1939 to escape the Nazi regime in Germany.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/André_Previn
• 
  Anne-Sophie Mutter
  Anne-Sophie Mutter (born June 29, 1963) is a German violinist. Supported early in her career by Herbert von Karajan, she has built a strong reputation for championing contemporary music with several works being composed specially for her including by Henri Dutilleux, Krzysztof Penderecki, Witold Lutosławski, Wolfgang Rihm and Sofia Gubaidulina.
  Mutter was born in Rheinfelden, Germany. She began playing the piano at the age of five, and shortly afterwards took up the violin, studying with Erna Honigberger, a pupil of Carl Flesch. After Honigberger's death she continued her studies with Aida Stucki at the Winterthur Conservatory.
  After winning several prizes, she was exempted from school to dedicate herself to her art. When she was 13, conductor Herbert von Karajan invited her to play with the Berlin Philharmonic: she made her public debut on stage in 1976 at the Lucerne Festival, playing Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4 in D major. In 1977, she made her debut at the Salzburg Festival and with the English Chamber Orchestra under Daniel Barenboim. At 15, Mutter made her first recording of the Mozart Third and Fifth violin concerti with von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic.
  
  wn.com/Anne-Sophie_Mutter
• Antal Doráti
  Antal Doráti, KBE (9 April 1906 – 13 November 1988) was a Hungarian-born conductor and composer who became a naturalized American citizen in 1947.
  Antal Doráti was born in Budapest, where his father Alexander Doráti was a violinist with the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra and his mother Margit Kunwald was a piano teacher.
  He studied at the Franz Liszt Academy with Zoltán Kodály and Leo Weiner for composition and Béla Bartók for piano. His links with Bartók continued for many years: he conducted the world premiere of Bartók's Viola Concerto, as completed by Tibor Serly, with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1949, with William Primrose as the soloist.
  He made his conducting debut in 1924 with the Budapest Royal Opera.
  As well as composing original works, he compiled and arranged pieces by Johann Strauss II for the ballet Graduation Ball (1940), premiered by the Original Ballet Russe in Sydney, Australia, with himself on the conductor's podium. For Ballet Theatre (later renamed American Ballet Theatre) he created scores for the ballets Bluebeard (1941) from music by Jacques Offenbach and The Fair at Sorochinsk (1943) from music by Modest Mussorgsky.
  
  wn.com/Antal_Doráti
• 
  Antonín Dvořák
  Antonín Leopold Dvořák (/ˈdvɔrʒɑːk/ DVOR-zhahk or /dɨˈvɔrʒæk/ di-VOR-zhak; Czech: [ˈantoɲiːn ˈlɛopolt ˈdvor̝aːk] ( listen); September 8, 1841 – May 1, 1904) was a Czech composer of late Romantic music, who employed the idioms of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia. Dvořák’s own style is sometimes called "romantic-classicist synthesis". His works include symphonic, choral and chamber music, concerti, operas and many of other orchestral and vocal-instrumental pieces.
  His best-known works include his New World Symphony, the Slavonic Dances, the Symphonic Variations, "American" String Quartet, Piano Quintet No 2, the opera Rusalka, Cello Concerto in B minor and choral works Stabat Mater, Requiem and Te Deum. Today, he is considered to be one of the most important composers of the Romantic era.
  Dvořák was born on September 8, 1841, in the Bohemian village of Nelahozeves, near Prague (then part of Bohemia in the Austrian Empire, now Czech Republic), where he spent most of his life. He was baptized as a Roman Catholic in the church of St. Andrew in the village. Dvořák's years in Nelahozeves nurtured the strong Christian faith and love for his Bohemian heritage that so strongly influenced his music. His father, František Dvořák (1814–1894), was an innkeeper, professional player of the zither, and a butcher. Although his father wanted him to be a butcher as well, Dvořák pursued a career in music. He received his earliest musical education at the village school, which he entered in 1847, aged six. From 1857 to 1859 he studied music in Prague's only organ school, and gradually developed into an accomplished player of the violin and the viola. He wrote his first string quartet when he was 20 years old, two years after graduating.
  
  wn.com/Antonín_Dvořák
• 
  Aretha Franklin
  Aretha Louise Franklin (born March 25, 1942) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and pianist. In a recording career that has spanned over half a century, Franklin's repertoire has included gospel, jazz, blues, R&B, pop, rock and funk. Franklin is known as one of the most important popularizers of the soul music genre and is referred to as the Queen of Soul, a title she was given early in her career. Franklin, the daughter of prominent Baptist minister and activist C. L. Franklin, began her singing career singing in her father's church at the age of ten and started recording four years later. After several years in the gospel circuit and with her father's blessing, she formed a secular pop music career at the age of eighteen, signing with Columbia Records, where she was branded by its CEO John Hammond as his most important act since Billie Holiday. Franklin's Columbia period wasn't as successful as hoped and in late 1966, Franklin switched over to Atlantic Records, where she began recording a string of popular hits including "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)", "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman", "Think", "Chain of Fools" and what later became her signature song, "Respect".
  
  wn.com/Aretha_Franklin
• 
  Art Tatum
  Arthur "Art" Tatum, Jr. (October 13, 1909 – November 5, 1956) was an American jazz pianist and virtuoso who played with phenomenal facility despite being nearly blind since birth.
  Tatum is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time and he was a major influence on later generations of jazz pianists. He was noted for the complexity and speed of his performances, which set a new standard for jazz piano virtuosity. Critic Scott Yanow wrote, "Tatum's quick reflexes and boundless imagination kept his improvisations filled with fresh (and sometimes futuristic) ideas that put him way ahead of his contemporaries ... Art Tatum's recordings still have the ability to scare modern pianists."
  For a musician of such stature, there is very little published information available about Tatum's life. Only one full-length biography has been published, Too Marvelous for Words, by James Lester. Lester interviewed many of Tatum's contemporaries for the book and drew from many articles published about him.
  
  wn.com/Art_Tatum
• 
  Arthur Nikisch
  Arthur Nikisch Hungarian: Nikisch Artúr; 12 October 1855 – 23 January 1922) was a Hungarian conductor who performed internationally, holding posts in Boston, London and - most importantly - Berlin. He was considered an outstanding interpreter of the music of Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Liszt. Johannes Brahms praised Nikisch's performance of his Fourth Symphony as "quite exemplary, it's impossible to hear it any better."
  Arthur Augustinus Adalbertus Nikisch was born in Mosonszentmiklós, Hungary to a Hungarian father, and a mother from Moravia.
  Nikisch began his studies at the Vienna Conservatory in 1866. There he studied under the composer Felix Otto Dessoff, the conductor Johann von Herbeck, and the violinist Joseph Hellmesberger, Jr. and won prizes for composition and performance on violin and piano. He was engaged as a violinist in the Vienna Philharmonic, and also played in the Bayreuth Festival orchestra in its inaugural season of 1876.
  He was to achieve most of his fame as a conductor. In 1878 he moved to Leipzig and became second conductor of the Leipzig Opera; in 1879 he was promoted to principal conductor . He gave the premiere of Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 7 in 1884.
  
  wn.com/Arthur_Nikisch
• Artur Rodziński
  Artur Rodziński (January 1, 1892 – November 27, 1958) was a Polish conductor of opera and symphonic music. He is especially noted for his tenures as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic in the 1930s and 1940s.
  Artur Rodziński was born in Split, the capital of Dalmatia on January 1, 1892. Soon after, his father, of Polish descent, and a general in the army of the Habsburg empire returned with his family to Lwów, Poland. Artur studied music in Lwów, and then law in Vienna, where he simultaneously enrolled at the Academy of Music; his teachers there included Josef Marx and Franz Schreker (composition), Franz Schalk (conducting), and Emil von Sauer and Jerzy Lalewicz (piano). He returned to Lwów where he was engaged as chorus master at the Opera House, making his debut as a conductor in 1920 with Verdi's Ernani. The following year saw him conducting the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra and at the Warsaw Opera House. While visiting Poland, Leopold Stokowski heard Rodziński leading a performance of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and exclaimed "I have found that rare thing, a born conductor!" and invited him to conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra.
  
  wn.com/Artur_Rodziński
• 
  B.B. King
  Riley B. King (born September 16, 1925), known by the stage name B.B. King, is an American songwriter, vocalist, and famed blues guitarist.
  Rolling Stone magazine ranked him at No. 6 on its list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. and No. 17 in in Gibson's Top 50 Guitarists of All Time. According to Edward M. Komara, King "introduced a sophisticated style of soloing based on fluid string bending and shimmering vibrato that would influence virtually every electric blues guitarist that followed." King was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.
  King was born in a small cabin on a cotton plantation outside of Berclair, Mississippi, to Albert King and Nora Ella Farr on September 16, 1925.
  
  wn.com/B.B._King
• 
  Benny Carter
  Bennett Lester Carter (August 8, 1907 – July 12, 2003) was an American jazz alto saxophonist, clarinetist, trumpeter, composer, arranger, and bandleader. He was a major figure in jazz from the 1930s to the 1990s, and was recognized as such by other jazz musicians who called him King. In 1958, he performed with Billie Holiday at the legendary Monterey Jazz Festival.
  The National Endowment for the Arts honored Benny Carter with its highest honor in jazz, the NEA Jazz Masters Award for 1986. He was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987, winner of the Grammy Award in 1994 for his solo "Prelude to a Kiss", and also the same year, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2000 awarded the National Endowment for the Arts, National Medal of Arts, presented by President Bill Clinton.
  Born in New York in 1907, the youngest of three children and the only boy, received his first music lessons on piano from his mother. Largely self-taught, by age fifteen, Carter was already sitting in at Harlem night spots. From 1924 to 1928, Carter gained valuable professional experience as a sideman in some of New York's top bands. As a youth, Carter lived in Harlem around the corner from Bubber Miley who was Duke Ellington's star trumpeter, Carter was inspired by Miley and bought a trumpet, but when he found he couldn't play like Miley he traded the trumpet in for a saxophone. For the next two years he played with such jazz greats as cornetist Rex Stewart, clarinetist-soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, pianists Earl Hines, Willie "The Lion" Smith, pianist Fats Waller, pianist James P. Johnson, pianist Duke Ellington and their various groups.
  
  wn.com/Benny_Carter
• Betty Comden
  Betty Comden (May 3, 1917 – November 23, 2006) was one-half of the musical-comedy duo Comden and Green, who provided lyrics, libretti, and screenplays to some of the most beloved and successful Hollywood musicals and Broadway shows of the mid-20th century. Her writing partnership with Adolph Green lasted for six decades, during which time they collaborated with other leading entertainment figures such as the famed "Freed Unit" at MGM, Jule Styne and Leonard Bernstein.
  Betty Comden was born Basya Cohen in New York City, attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, and studied drama at New York University. In 1938, mutual friends introduced her to Adolph Green, an aspiring actor. Along with the young Judy Holliday and Leonard Bernstein, Comden and Green formed a troupe called the Revuers, which performed at the Village Vanguard, a club in Greenwich Village. Due to the act's success, the Revuers appeared in the 1944 film Greenwich Village, but their roles were so small they barely were noticed, and they quickly returned to New York.
  
  wn.com/Betty_Comden
• 
  Billy Wilder
  Billy Wilder (22 June 1906 – 27 March 2002) was an Austro-Hungarian born American filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, artist, and journalist, whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age. Wilder is one of only five people to have won Academy Awards as producer, director, and writer for the same film (The Apartment).
  Wilder became a screenwriter in the late 1920s while living in Berlin. After the rise of Nazi Party, Wilder, who was Jewish, left for Paris, where he made his directorial debut. He relocated to Hollywood in 1933, and in 1939 he had a hit when he co-wrote the screenplay to the screwball comedy Ninotchka. Wilder established his directorial reputation after helming Double Indemnity (1944), a film noir he co-wrote with mystery novelist Raymond Chandler. Wilder earned the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for the adaptation of a Charles R. Jackson story The Lost Weekend, about alcoholism. In 1950, Wilder co-wrote and directed the critically acclaimed Sunset Boulevard.
  
  wn.com/Billy_Wilder
• 
  Bob Dylan
  Bob Dylan ( /ˈdɪlən/), born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, is an American singer-songwriter, musician and artist. He has been an influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly reluctant figurehead of social unrest. A number of Dylan's early songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", became anthems for the US civil rights and anti-war movements. Leaving his initial base in the culture of folk music behind, Dylan's six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone" has been described as radically altering the parameters of popular music in 1965. However, his recordings employing electric instruments attracted denunciation and criticism from others in the folk movement.
  Dylan's lyrics incorporated a variety of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences. They defied existing pop music conventions and appealed hugely to the then burgeoning counterculture. Initially inspired by the songs of Woody Guthrie,Robert Johnson, and Hank Williams, as well as the music and performance styles of Buddy Holly and Little Richard, Dylan has both amplified and personalized musical genres. His recording career, spanning fifty years, has explored numerous distinct traditions in American song—from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock and roll, and rockabilly to English, Scottish, and Irish folk music, embracing even jazz and swing.
  
  wn.com/Bob_Dylan
• Bronisław Kaper
  Bronisław Kaper (February 5, 1902 – April 26, 1983) was a Polish film composer who scored films and musical theater in Germany, France, and the USA. The American immigration authorities misspelled his name as Bronislau Kaper. He was also variously credited as Bronislaw Kaper, Bronislaw Kapper, Benjamin Kapper, and Edward Kane.
  Kaper is now perhaps best remembered as the composer of the jazz standards "Invitation" (with words by Paul Francis Webster) and "On Green Dolphin Street" the latter for the 1947 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film of the same name. He also scored the MGM film musical Lili (1953) and the TV series The F.B.I. (1965–1974).
  Bronisław Kaper began playing the piano at the age of six, and soon demonstrated considerable talent on this instrument. He studied composition and piano at the Warsaw Conservatory, and law at Warsaw University, in deference to his father's wishes. Soon after completing his studies, Kaper went to Berlin - then a city with many theaters and cabarets, where many artists from Eastern Europe - mainly Russia, Poland and Hungary were trying their luck.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Bronisław_Kaper
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  Carlo Maria Giulini
  Carlo Maria Giulini (Italian pronunciation: [ˈkarlo maˈriːa dʒuˈliːni]; May 9, 1914 – June 14, 2005) was an Italian conductor.
  Giulini was born in Barletta, Italy, to a father born in Lombardy and a mother born in Naples; but he was raised in Bolzano, which at the time of his birth was part of Austria (it was given to Italy in the Treaty of London (1915)). Therefore, most of the neighbors spoke a dialect of German, and the local music he heard tended to be Austrian/ Tyrolean. He recalled being transfixed by the town band.
  Giulini was given a violin for Christmas in 1919, when he was five, and progressed rapidly with local instructors, notably a Bohemian violinist (and local pharmacist) whom he called "Brahms." In 1928, the distinguished Italian violinist/composer Remy Principe (1889–1977) gave a recital in Bolzano, and auditioned Giulini; he invited Giulini to study with him at Italy's foremost conservatory, the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Giulini undertook his studies there two years later, at the age of 16. He studied viola with Principe, composition with Alessandro Bustini (1876–1970), and conducting with Bernardino Molinari.
  
  wn.com/Carlo_Maria_Giulini
• Carmen Dragon
  Carmen Dragon (July 28, 1914 – March 28, 1984) was an American conductor, composer, and arranger who in addition to live performances and recording, worked in radio, film, and television.
  Dragon was born in Antioch, California. He was very active in pops music conducting and composed scores for several films, including At Gunpoint (1955), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Night into Tomorrow (1951), and Kiss Tomorrow Good-bye (1950).
  With Morris Stoloff, he shared the 1944 Oscar for the popular Gene Kelly/Rita Hayworth musical Cover Girl, which featured songs by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin.
  He made a popular orchestral arrangement of "America the Beautiful" and also re-arranged it for symphonic band. According to his website, he was awarded an Emmy in 1964.
  He conducted the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, and they performed on The Standard School Broadcast, broadcast on NBC in the western U.S. for elementary schools from 1928 through the 1970s. The show was sponsored by the Standard Oil Company of California (now the Chevron Corporation), but other than the name there were no commercials. The program featured a high quality introduction to classical music for young people growing up in the 1940s and early 1950s.
  
  wn.com/Carmen_Dragon
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  Charles Dutoit
  Charles Édouard Dutoit, (French pronunciation: [ʃaʁl e.dwaːʁ dy.twa]) OC GOQ (born 7 October 1936) is a Swiss conductor, particularly noted for his interpretations of French and Russian 20th century music. He has made influential modern recordings of Hector Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette and Maurice Ravel's ballets Daphnis et Chloé and Ma mère l'oye. He currently serves as the Principal Conductor and Artistic Director of London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
  
  
  Dutoit was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, studied there and graduated from the Geneva Conservatory where he won first prize in conducting, then he went to the Music Academy in Siena by the invitation of Alceo Galliera. In his younger days, he frequently attended Ernest Ansermet's rehearsals and had a personal acquaintance with him. He also worked with Herbert von Karajan at Lucerne as a member of the festival youth orchestra and studied with Charles Munch at Tanglewood. Dutoit began his professional music career in 1957 as a viola player with various orchestras across Europe and South America. In January 1959, he made his debut as a professional conductor with an orchestra of Radio Lausanne and Martha Argerich. From 1959 he was a guest conductor of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra. After this, he was the conductor for Radio Zurich until 1967, when he took over the Bern Symphony Orchestra from Paul Kletzki, where he stayed for eleven years.
  
  wn.com/Charles_Dutoit
• Charles Previn
  Charles Previn (January 11, 1888, Brooklyn - September 21, 1973, Los Angeles) was an American film composer who was highly active at Universal in Hollywood during the 1940s and 1950s. Before going to Hollywood, Previn had arranged music for over 100 Broadway productions.
  From 1936 to 1944, Previn was musical director at Universal, overseeing everything from horror pictures to Arabian Nights fantasies. He was the great-uncle of German-born composer, pianist, conductor Andre Previn and TV and film director Steve Previn (brothers).
  While at Universal, Previn composed uncredited stock music for several studio's releases.
  General references
  Inline citations
  
  wn.com/Charles_Previn
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  Charlie Chaplin
  Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977) was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I. Chaplin used mime, slapstick and other visual comedy routines, and continued well into the era of the talkies, though his films decreased in frequency from the end of the 1920s. His most famous role was that of The Tramp, which he first played in the Keystone comedy Kid Auto Races at Venice in 1914. From the April 1914 one-reeler Twenty Minutes of Love onwards he was writing and directing most of his films, by 1916 he was also producing them, and from 1918 he was even composing the music for them. With Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith, he co-founded United Artists in 1919.
  Chaplin was one of the most creative and influential personalities of the silent-film era. He was influenced by his predecessor, the French silent film comedian Max Linder, to whom he dedicated one of his films. His working life in entertainment spanned over 75 years, from the Victorian stage and the music hall in the United Kingdom as a child performer, until close to his death at the age of 88. His high-profile public and private life encompassed both adulation and controversy. Chaplin was identified with left-wing politics during the McCarthy era and he was ultimately forced to resettle in Europe from 1952.
  
  wn.com/Charlie_Chaplin
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  Charlton Heston
  Charlton Heston (born John Charles Carter; October 4, 1923 – April 5, 2008) was an American actor of film, theatre and television. Heston is known for heroic roles in films such as The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, El Cid, and Planet of the Apes. He also is well known for his roles in the films The Greatest Show on Earth and Touch of Evil.
  Heston was also known for his political activism. In the 1950s and 1960s he was one of a handful of Hollywood actors to speak openly against racism and was an active supporter of the Civil Rights Movement. Initially a moderate Democrat, he later supported conservative Republican policies and was president of the National Rifle Association from 1998 to 2003.
  Heston was born John Charles Carter, the son of Lilla (née Charlton; 1899–1994) and Russell Whitford Carter (1897–1966), a sawmill operator. Most sources state that he was born in Evanston, Illinois. Heston's autobiography, however, and some other sources place his birth in No Man's Land, Illinois, which usually refers to a then-unincorporated area now part of Wilmette, a wealthy northern suburb of Chicago. Heston said in a 1995 interview that he was not very good at remembering addresses or his early childhood.
  
  wn.com/Charlton_Heston
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  Christoph Eschenbach
  Christoph Eschenbach (pronounced [ˈkʁɪstɔf ˈɛʃn̩bax]), born February 20, 1940, Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland) is a German-born pianist and conductor. He currently holds positions in Washington, D.C. as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra and music director of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
  Eschenbach's parents were Margarethe (née Jaross) and Heribert Ringmann. He was orphaned during World War II. His mother died giving birth to him; his father, a politically active anti-Nazi, was sent to the Eastern front as part of a Nazi punishment battalion where he was killed. As a result of this trauma, Eschenbach did not speak for a year, until he was asked if he wanted to play music. Wallydore Eschenbach (née Jaross), his mother's cousin, adopted him in 1946 and began to teach him to play the piano. At age 11, he attended a concert conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler which had a great impact on the youngster. In 1955 Eschenbach enrolled at the Musikhochschule in Cologne, studying piano with Hans-Otto Schmidt-Neuhaus and conducting with Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg.
  
  wn.com/Christoph_Eschenbach
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  Claudio Abbado
  Claudio Abbado, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (Italian pronunciation: [ˈklaudio abˈbaːdo]; born June 26, 1933), is an Italian conductor. He has served as music director of the La Scala opera house in Milan, principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, music director of the Vienna State Opera, and principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra from 1989 to 2002, when he retired from the position for health reasons.
  Born in Milan, Italy, Abbado is the son of the violinist and composer Michelangelo Abbado, who was his first piano teacher, and the brother of musician Marcello Abbado. After studying piano at the Milan Conservatory, in 1955 Claudio Abbado studied conducting with Hans Swarowsky at the Vienna Academy of Music. In 1958 he won the international Koussevitsky Competition for conductors, which resulted in a number of operatic conducting engagements in Italy, and in 1963 he won the Dimitri Mitropoulos Prize for conductors, allowing him to work for five months with the New York Philharmonic.
  
  wn.com/Claudio_Abbado
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  Colin Davis
  Sir Colin Rex Davis, CH, CBE (born 25 September 1927) is an English conductor. His repertoire is broad, but among the composers with whom he is particularly associated are Mozart, Berlioz, Elgar, Sibelius, Stravinsky and Tippett.
  He studied as a clarinettist, but was intent on becoming a conductor. After struggles as a freelance conductor from 1949 to 1957, he gained a series of appointments with orchestras including the BBC Scottish Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. He has been associated with the London Symphony Orchestra for over 50 years, including over ten years as its principal conductor. He has also held the musical directorships of Sadler's Wells Opera and the Royal Opera House, where he was principal conductor for over fifteen years. His guest conductorships include the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Dresden Staatskapelle, among many others.
  As a teacher, Davis holds posts at the Royal Academy of Music, London, and the Carl Maria von Weber High School of Music in Dresden. He made his first gramophone recordings in 1958, and his discography built up in the succeeding five decades is extensive, with a large number of studio recordings for Philips Records and a growing catalogue of live recordings for the London Symphony Orchestra's own label.
  
  wn.com/Colin_Davis
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  Daniele Gatti
  Daniele Gatti (born 6 November 1961, Milan) is an Italian conductor. Official website: www.danielegatti.eu
  He is currently Music Director of the Orchestre National de France, a role he assumed in September, 2008 , and also Chief Conductor of the Zurich Opera, a position he began in September, 2009; his contract is for three seasons, after which time renewal may be negotiated.
  Gatti was principal conductor of the Orchestra Dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome from 1992 to 1997. In 1997, he became the music director of the Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna. He has also served as principal guest conductor of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In 2005, alongside Zubin Mehta and Christian Thielemann, Gatti was invited to conduct a concert in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1955 reopening and renovation of the Vienna State Opera. His debut at the Bayreuth Festival was in Stefan Herheim's production of Parsifal in 2008.
  In 1994, Gatti made his first guest conducting appearance with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO). He was immediately offered the position of the RPO's principal conductor, and he assumed the post in 1996. Gatti is regarded as having restored the RPO's status on par to the other main London orchestras. During his tenure, in 2004, the RPO acquired its first permanent residency at Cadogan Hall. In April 2007, Gatti was one of eight conductors of British orchestras to endorse the 10-year classical music outreach manifesto, "Building on Excellence: Orchestras for the 21st Century", to increase the presence of classical music in the UK, including giving free entry to all British schoolchildren to a classical music concert. In 2009, Gatti stepped down as the RPO's principal conductor and became the orchestra's conductor laureate.
  
  wn.com/Daniele_Gatti
• David Finck
  David E. Finck (b. August 26, 1958) is an American jazz bassist. He plays both bass guitar and double bass.
  Finck was born in Rochester, New York. He studied under Sam Goradetzer and Michael Shahan of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and graduated from Eastman School of Music in 1980. He played with Woody Herman in 1980-81 and then moved to New York City, where he played with Joe Williams, Annie Ross, Mel Lewis, Al Cohn, Ernestine Anderson, Rosemary Clooney, Tom Harrell, Jerry Dodgion, Phil Woods, Clark Terry, and Al Grey in the 1980s. He worked with Paquito D'Rivera and Steve Kuhn in the 1990s, as well as Freddie Hubbard, Makoto Ozone, and Eddie Daniels.
  Finck's debut release as a leader, Future Day, was released in 2008 on Soundbrush Records. The album features Joe Locke, Tom Ranier, and Joe LaBarbera, as well as guest appearances from Jeremy Pelt and Bob Sheppard.
  With Steve Kuhn
  
  wn.com/David_Finck
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  Dimitri Tiomkin
  Dimitri Zinovievich Tiomkin (May 10, 1894 – November 11, 1979) was a Russian-born Hollywood film score composer and conductor. He is considered "one of the giants of Hollywood movie music." Musically trained in Russia, he is best known for his westerns, "where his expansive, muscular style had its greatest impact." Tiomkin received 22 Academy Award nominations and won four Oscars.
  Dimitri Tiomkin (Ukrainian: Дмитро Зиновійович Тьомкін, Dmytro Zynoviyovych Tiomkin, Russian: Дмитрий Зиновьевич Тёмкин, Dmitrij Zinov'evič Tjomkin, sometimes transliterated as Dmitri Tiomkin) was born in Kremenchuk, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire.
  His family was of Jewish descent, with his father a "distinguished pathologist" and associate of Professor Paul Ehrlich, the inventor and Nobel laureate noted for discovering a cure for syphilis and for his research in autoimmunity, later becoming chemotherapy. His mother was a musician who began teaching the young Tiomkin piano at an early age. Her hope was to have her son become a professional pianist, according to Tiomkin biographer, Christopher Palmer. Tiomkin described his mother as being "small, blonde, merry and vivacious."
  
  wn.com/Dimitri_Tiomkin
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  Dinah Shore
  Dinah Shore (born Frances Rose Shore; February 29, 1916 – February 24, 1994) was an American singer, actress, and television personality. She reached the height of her popularity as a recording artist during the Big Band era of the 1940s and 1950s, but achieved even greater success a decade later, in television, mainly as hostess of a series of variety programs for Chevrolet.
  After failing singing auditions for the bands of Benny Goodman and both Jimmy Dorsey and his brother Tommy Dorsey, Shore struck out on her own to become the first singer of her era to achieve huge solo success. She had a string of 80 charted popular hits, lasting from 1940 into the late '50s, and after appearing in a handful of films went on to a four-decade career in American television, starring in her own music and variety shows in the '50s and '60s and hosting two talk shows in the '70s. TV Guide magazine ranked her at #16 on their list of the top fifty television stars of all time. Stylistically, Dinah Shore was compared to two singers who followed her in the mid-to-late '40s and early '50s, Doris Day and Patti Page.
  
  wn.com/Dinah_Shore
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  Dizzy Gillespie
  John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie ( /ɡɨˈlɛspi/; October 21, 1917 – January 6, 1993) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer and, occasionally, singer.
  Allmusic's Scott Yanow wrote, "Dizzy Gillespie's contributions to jazz were huge. One of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time (some would say the best), Gillespie was such a complex player that his contemporaries ended up copying Miles Davis and Fats Navarro instead, and it was not until Jon Faddis's emergence in the 1970s that Dizzy's style was successfully recreated . . . Arguably Gillespie is remembered, by both critics and fans alike, as one of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time."
  Gillespie was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser, building on the virtuoso style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of harmonic complexity previously unknown in jazz. His beret and horn-rimmed spectacles, his scat singing, his bent horn, pouched cheeks and his light-hearted personality were essential in popularizing bebop.
  In the 1940s Gillespie, together with Charlie Parker, became a major figure in the development of bebop and modern jazz. He taught and influenced many other musicians, including trumpeters Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Arturo Sandoval, Lee Morgan, Jon Faddis and Chuck Mangione.
  
  wn.com/Dizzy_Gillespie
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  Doris Day
  Doris Day (born Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff, April 3, 1924) is an American actress, singer, and animal rights activist. With an entertainment career that spanned through almost 50 years, Day started her career as a big band singer in 1939, but only began to be noticed after her first hit recording, "Sentimental Journey", in 1945. After leaving the Les Brown & His Band of Renown to try a solo career, she started her long-lasting partnership with Columbia Records, which would remain her only recording label. The contract lasted from 1947 to 1967, and included more than 650 recordings, making Day one of the most popular and acclaimed singers of the 20th century. In 1948, after being persuaded by Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne and her agent at the time, Al Levy, she auditioned for Michael Curtiz, which led to her being cast in the female lead role in Romance on the High Seas.
  With a legendary Hollywood "girl next door" image, and capable of delivering comedy and romance as well as heavy drama, she appeared in 39 films, released 29 albums, spent 460 weeks in the Top 40 charts and eventually became one of America's most beloved entertainers. She received an Academy Award nomination for her performance in Pillow Talk, won three Henrietta Awards (World Film Favorite), a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, Presidential Medal of Freedom, Legend Award from the Society of Singers, Los Angeles Film Critics Association's Career Achievement Award and, in 1989, received the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in motion pictures.
  
  wn.com/Doris_Day
• Dory Previn
  Dory Previn, born Dorothy Veronica Langan (October 22, 1925 – February 14, 2012), was an American lyricist, singer-songwriter and poet.
  During the late 1950s and 1960s she was a lyricist on songs intended for motion pictures and, with her then husband, André Previn, received several Academy Award nominations. In the 1970s, after their divorce, she released six albums of original songs and an acclaimed live album. Previn's lyrics from this period are characterized by their originality, irony and honesty in dealing with her troubled personal life as well as more generally about relationships, sexuality, religion and psychology. She continued to work until her death as a writer of song lyrics and prose.
  Previn was born in Rahway, New Jersey, the eldest daughter in a strict Catholic family of Irish origin. She had a troubled relationship with her father, especially during childhood. He had served in the First World War and been gassed, and experienced periods of depression and violent mood swings. He tended to alternately embrace and reject her, but supported her when she began to show talents for singing and dancing. However, his mental health deteriorated after the birth of a second daughter, culminating in a paranoid episode in which he boarded the family up in their home and held them at gunpoint for several months. Previn's childhood experiences, described in her autobiography Midnight Baby, had a profound effect on her later life and work.
  
  wn.com/Dory_Previn
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  Duke Ellington
  Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American composer, pianist, and big-band leader. Ellington wrote over 1,000 compositions. In the opinion of Bob Blumenthal of The Boston Globe "In the century since his birth, there has been no greater composer, American or otherwise, than Edward Kennedy Ellington." A major figure in the history of jazz, Ellington's music stretched into various other genres, including blues, gospel, film scores, popular, and classical. His career spanned more than 50 years and included leading his orchestra, composing an inexhaustible songbook, scoring for movies, composing stage musicals, and world tours. Several of his instrumental works were adapted into songs that became standards. Due to his inventive use of the orchestra, or big band, and thanks to his eloquence and extraordinary charisma, he is generally considered to have elevated the perception of jazz to an art form on a par with other traditional genres of music. His reputation increased after his death and the Pulitzer Prize Board bestowed on him a special posthumous honor in 1999.
  
  wn.com/Duke_Ellington
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  Eduard van Beinum
  Eduard van Beinum (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈɛdu̯ɑrd ʋɑn ˈbɛi̯nəm]) (September 3, 1901 – April 13, 1959, Amsterdam) was a Dutch conductor.
  Beinum was born in Arnhem, Netherlands, where he received his first violin and piano lessons at an early age. He joined the Arnhem Orchestra as a violinist in 1918. His grandfather was conductor of a military band. His father played the double bass in the local symphony orchestra, the Arnhemse Orkest (later Het Gelders Orkest). His brother Co van Beinum was a violinist, and the two brothers performed as a violin-piano duo in concerts. As a student at the Amsterdam Conservatoire, he gained conducting experience with several concerts by amateur ensembles in Schiedam and Zutphen. He also conducted concerts by the choir of the church of St. Nicholas in Amsterdam.
  Van Beinum was the conductor of the Haarlem Orchestral Society from 1927 to 1931. He first conducted the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam in 1929. He became second conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1931, under the supervision of Willem Mengelberg. In 1938 he was named co-principal conductor, alongside Mengelberg. After World War II, Mengelberg was dismissed as principal conductor because of controversy over his (still-disputed) behavior and attitude towards the Nazi occupiers in the Netherlands. According to Kees Wisse, Van Beinum "detested the Nazis and kept himself as aloof as he could." Van Beinum did receive a reprimand after the post-war de-Nazification activities, but this was not so severe as to keep him from his post with the Concertgebouw. Van Beinum remained as sole principal conductor of the orchestra after the war.
  
  wn.com/Eduard_van_Beinum
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  Edvard Grieg
  Edvard Hagerup Grieg /ˈɛdʋɑɖ ˈhɑːgəɾʉːp gɾiːg/ (15 June 1843 – 4 September 1907) was a Norwegian composer and pianist. He is best known for his Piano Concerto in A minor, for his incidental music to Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt (which includes Morning Mood and In the Hall of the Mountain King), and for his collection of piano miniatures Lyric Pieces.
  Edvard Hagerup Grieg was born in Bergen, Norway on 15 June 1843. His parents were Alexander Grieg (1806–1875), a merchant and vice consul in Bergen, and Gesine Judithe Hagerup (1814–1875), a music teacher and daughter of Edvard Hagerup. The family name, originally spelled Greig, has Scottish origins. After the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Grieg's great-grandfather traveled widely, settling in Norway about 1770, and establishing business interests in Bergen.
  Edvard Grieg was raised in a musical area. His mother was his first piano teacher and taught him to play at the age of 6. Grieg studied in several schools,^{[clarification needed]} including Tank's School. He often brought in samples of his music to class.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Edvard_Grieg
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  Edward Albee
  Edward Franklin Albee III ( /ˈɔːlbiː/ AWL-bee; born March 12, 1928) is an American playwright who is best known for The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and a rewrite of the book for the unsuccessful musical version of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1966). His works are considered well-crafted, often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Younger American playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, credit Albee's daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue with helping to reinvent the post-war American theatre in the early 1960s. Albee continues to experiment in new works, such as The Goat: or, Who Is Sylvia? (2002).
  According to Magill's Survey of American Literature (2007), Edward Albee was born somewhere in Virginia (the popular belief is that he was born in Washington, D.C.). He was adopted two weeks later and taken to Larchmont, New York in Westchester County, where he grew up. Albee's adoptive father, Reed A. Albee, the wealthy son of vaudeville magnate Edward Franklin Albee II, owned several theaters. Here the young Edward first gained familiarity with the theatre as a child. His adoptive mother, Reed's third wife, Frances tried to raise Albee to fit into their social circles.
  
  wn.com/Edward_Albee
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  Edward Elgar
  Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet OM, GCVO (2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello, and two symphonies. He also composed choral works, including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924.
  Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe. He felt himself to be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. In musical circles dominated by academics, he was a self-taught composer; in Protestant Britain, his Roman Catholicism was regarded with suspicion in some quarters; and in the class-conscious society of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, he was acutely sensitive about his humble origins even after he achieved recognition. He nevertheless married the daughter of a senior British army officer. She inspired him both musically and socially, but he struggled to achieve success until his forties, when after a series of moderately successful works his Enigma Variations (1899) became immediately popular in Britain and overseas. He followed the Variations with a choral work, The Dream of Gerontius (1900), based on a Roman Catholic text that caused some disquiet in the Anglican establishment in Britain, but it became, and has remained, a core repertory work in Britain and elsewhere. His later full-length religious choral works were well received but have not entered the regular repertory. The first of his Pomp and Circumstance Marches (1901) is well known in the English-speaking world.
  
  wn.com/Edward_Elgar
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  Edward Villella
  Edward Villella (born October 1, 1936, Bayside), New York, is a danseur and choreographer, frequently cited as America's most celebrated male dancer at the time.
  Villella enrolled in the School of American Ballet at age ten, but then interrupted his studies to complete his college education. He attended the New York Maritime Academy, where he lettered in baseball and was a championship boxer. He graduated with a marine science degree in 1959, and rejoined the School of American Ballet.
  Villella became a member of the New York City Ballet in 1957, rising to soloist in 1958 and principal dancer in 1960. Among his most noteworthy performances were Oberon in George Balanchine's ballet A Midsummer Night's Dream (with music by Felix Mendelssohn), Tarantella, Rubies in the Balanchine ballet Jewels, and Prodigal Son.
  Villella was the first American male dancer to appear with the Royal Danish Ballet, and the only American ever asked to dance an encore at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. He danced at the inaugural for President John F. Kennedy, and performed for Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. He won an Emmy Award in 1975 for his CBS television production of Harlequinade. He danced in two television versions of The Nutcracker (in different roles), in a ballet film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and in a 1966 TV production of Brigadoon, in which he played the tragic suitor Harry Beaton. During the 1960s he and his dancing partner Patricia McBride, who starred together in a 1965 television version of The Nutcracker, appeared often on the Ed Sullivan Show. In 1973, Villella appeared as himself in an episode of The Odd Couple titled "Last Tango in Newark" during which he said (much to Felix's dismay) that he always wanted to be a professional football player; his son, Roddy, also appeared. In 1983, Villella guest-starred on the soap opera Guiding Light.
  
  wn.com/Edward_Villella
• Efrem Kurtz
  Efrem Kurtz (Russian: Ефрем Курц; November 7, 1900, Saint Petersburg, Russia – June 27, 1995, London) was a Russian conductor. He studied at the Saint Petersburg conservatory with Alexander Glazunov and Nikolai Tcherepnin, among others. He later studied in Riga, Berlin and in Leipzig, in the last city as a pupil of Arthur Nikisch.
  Kurtz made his conducting debut when he substituted for an ill Nikisch to accompany the dancer Isadora Duncan on tour. This led to a number of concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic. From 1924 to 1933 he conducted the Stuttgart Philharmonic, and in 1928, Kurtz was enagaged by Anna Pavlova to accompany her dancing, which he did until her death in 1931. From 1932 to 1942 he was conductor of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, touring with them extensively. His work in Monte Carlo included conducting the premiere of Gaîté Parisienne.
  Kurtz later moved to the United States, and became a citizen of that country in 1944. He was music director of the Kansas City Philharmonic from 1943 to 1948. He held the same post with the Houston Symphony from 1948 to 1954. He also conducted a number of film scores, including Jacques Ibert's score for Orson Welles' Macbeth.
  
  wn.com/Efrem_Kurtz
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  Ella Fitzgerald
  Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917 – June 15, 1996), also known as the "First Lady of Song", "Queen of Jazz", and "Lady Ella", was an American jazz and song vocalist. With a vocal range spanning three octaves (D♭3 to D♭6), she was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing and intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.
  Fitzgerald was a notable interpreter of the Great American Songbook. Over the course of her 59-year recording career, she was the winner of 13 Grammy Awards and was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Ronald Reagan and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George H. W. Bush.
  Fitzgerald was born in Newport News, Virginia, the child of a common-law marriage between William and Temperance "Tempie" Fitzgerald. The pair separated soon after her birth and she and her mother went to Yonkers, New York, where they eventually moved in with Tempie's longtime boyfriend, Joseph Da Silva. Fitzgerald's half-sister, Frances Da Silva, was born in 1923. She and her family were Methodists and were active in the Bethany African Methodist Episcopal Church and she regularly attended worship services, Bible study, and Sunday School.
  
  wn.com/Ella_Fitzgerald
• Elmer Bernstein
  Elmer Bernstein (April 4, 1922 – August 18, 2004) was an American composer and conductor best known for his many film scores. In a career which spanned fifty years, he composed music for hundreds of film and television productions. His most popular works include the scores to The Magnificent Seven, The Ten Commandments, The Great Escape, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Ghostbusters.
  Bernstein won an Oscar for his score to Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) and was nominated for fourteen Oscars in total. He also won two Golden Globes and was nominated for two Grammy Awards.
  Bernstein was born in New York City, the son of Selma (née Feinstein) and Edward Bernstein. He was not related to the celebrated composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, but the two men were friends, and even shared a certain physical similarity. Within the world of professional music, they were distinguished from each other by the use of the nicknames Bernstein West (Elmer) and Bernstein East (Leonard).
  During his childhood, Bernstein performed professionally as a dancer and an actor, in the latter case playing the part of Caliban in The Tempest on Broadway, and he also won several prizes for his painting. He gravitated toward music at the age of twelve, at which time he was given a scholarship in piano by Henriette Michelson, a Juilliard teacher who guided him throughout his entire career as a pianist. She took him to play some of his improvisations for composer Aaron Copland, who was encouraging and selected Israel Citkowitz as a teacher for the young boy. Bernstein's music has some stylistic similarities to Copland's music, most notably in his western scores, particularly sections of Big Jake, in the Gregory Peck film Amazing Grace and Chuck, and in his spirited score for the 1958 film adaptation of Erskine Caldwell's novel God's Little Acre.
  
  wn.com/Elmer_Bernstein
• Emil Paur
  Emil Paur (July 19, 1855 – June 7, 1932) was an Austrian orchestra conductor. Paur was born in Czernowitz, Austria, now Ukraine, and trained in Vienna before working as a conductor in Kassel, Königsberg and Leipzig. He then emigrated to the United States where he led the Boston Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic and Pittsburgh Symphony. After returning to Germany, he went on to conduct Berlin State Opera. Paur was considered a serious conductor, favouring the works of Johannes Brahms, which were at the time considered heavy listening.
  Paur died in Místek, Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic.
  
  
  
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  Eric Morecambe
  John Eric Bartholomew OBE (14 May 1926 – 28 May 1984), known by his stage name Eric Morecambe, was an English comedian who together with Ernie Wise formed the award-winning double act Morecambe and Wise. The partnership lasted from 1941 until Morecambe's death of a heart attack in 1984. Eric took his stage name from his home town, the seaside resort of Morecambe.
  He is best remembered for the television series The Morecambe & Wise Show, which for some of its Christmas episodes gained UK viewing figures of over twenty-eight million people. The duo's reputation enabled them to have a number of prestigious guests on the show, including Angela Rippon, Cliff Richard, Laurence Olivier, John Mills, the Dad's Army cast, Glenda Jackson, Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Elton John, The Beatles and even former Prime Minister Harold Wilson.^{[citation needed]}
  Eric Morecambe was born as John Eric Bartholomew to George and Sadie Bartholomew. Sadie was determined to see her only child make a success of his life, and took work as a waitress to raise funds for his dancing lessons. He didn't enjoy these lessons at the time, although they were to come in handy during his later life. During this period, Eric Bartholomew won numerous talent contests, most notably in Hoylake in 1940, the prize for which was an audition with Jack Hylton. Also present was another young talent named Ernest Wiseman, already a familiar voice from Arthur Askey's radio series Band Waggon.^{[citation needed]} This was the first meeting of what was to become one of the United Kingdom's most loved comedy partnerships, although it was to be a further two years before they would team up. Three months after the audition, Hylton invited Eric to join a revue called Youth Takes a Bow at the Nottingham Empire, where once more he encountered Ernie. The two soon became very close friends, and with Sadie's encouragement started to develop a double act. In 1940, Eric left school at the age of 14.^{[citation needed]}
  
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  Esa-Pekka Salonen
  Esa-Pekka Salonen ( pronunciation (help·info); born June 30, 1958 in Helsinki) is a Finnish orchestral conductor and composer. He is currently Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London and Conductor Laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
  Salonen, born in Helsinki, Finland, studied horn and composition at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, as well as conducting with Jorma Panula. His conducting classmates included Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Osmo Vänskä. Another classmate on the composition side was the composer Magnus Lindberg and together they formed the new-music appreciation group Korvat auki ("Ears open" in the Finnish language) and the experimental ensemble Toimii (lit. "It works"). Later, Salonen studied with the composers Franco Donatoni, Niccolò Castiglioni and Einojuhani Rautavaara.
  His first experience with conducting came in 1979 with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, though he still thought of himself principally as a composer; in fact, Salonen has said that the primary reason he took up conducting was to ensure that someone would conduct his own compositions. In 1983, however, he replaced an indisposed Michael Tilson Thomas to conduct a performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 3 with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London at very short notice without ever having studied the score before that time, and it launched his career as a conductor. He was subsequently principal guest conductor of the Philharmonia from 1985 to 1994.
  
  wn.com/Esa-Pekka_Salonen
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  Fayard Nicholas
  Fayard Antonio Nicholas (October 20, 1914 – January 24, 2006) was an American choreographer, dancer and actor. He, along with his brother Harold, made up the Nicholas Brothers tap-dance duo who starred in the MGM musicals An All-Colored Vaudeville Show (1935), Stormy Weather (1943), The Pirate (1948), The Five Heartbeats (1991) and Hard Four (2007). Fayard Nicholas was a member of the Bahá'í Faith.
  Fayard was inducted into the National Museum of Dance C.V. Whitney Hall of Fame in 2001, along with his brother Harold Nicholas.
  
  
  
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• Ferenc Fricsay
  Ferenc Fricsay (9 August 1914 – 20 February 1963) (pronounced [ˈfɛrɛnts ˈfritʃɒj]) was a Hungarian conductor. From 1960 until his death, he was an Austrian citizen.
  Fricsay was born in Budapest in 1914 and studied music under Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, Ernst von Dohnányi, and Leo Weiner. With these and other faculty at the Budapest Academy of Music he studied piano, violin, clarinet, trombone, percussion, composition and conducting. Fricsay made his first appearance as a conductor at age 15, substituting for his father at the podium of the Young Musicians Orchestra of Budapest. In 1930, at the age of 16, he succeeded his father as conductor of the Young Musicians Orchestra.
  On graduating in 1933, Fricsay became repetiteur for the chorus of the Budapest Opera; then, from 1933 to 1943, he was music director of the Szeged Philharmonic Orchestra (Szeged is the third largest city in Hungary); he also served as director of its military band from 1933. In 1942, he was court-martialed by the government of Miklós Horthy for wanting to employ Jewish musicians, and for having "Jewish blood" himself (according to reliable reports, his mother was Jewish). When the Nazis occupied Hungary in 1944, the chief editor of the Szeged daily newspaper warned Fricsay that the Gestapo planned to arrest him; he and his wife and three children avoided this fate by going underground in Budapest.
  
  wn.com/Ferenc_Fricsay
• Francis Lai
  Francis Lai (born April 26, 1932, Nice, Alpes-Maritimes, France) is a French accordionist, and composer noted for his film scores.
  While in his twenties, Francis Lai left home and went to Paris where he became part of the lively Montmartre music scene. In 1965 he met filmmaker Claude Lelouch and was hired to help write the score for the film, Un homme et une femme (A Man and A Woman). Released in 1966, the film was a major international success, earning a number of Academy Awards, and for the young Francis Lai, a Golden Globe Award nomination for "Best Original Score". This initial success brought more opportunities to work for the film industry both in his native France as well as in Great Britain and the United States. He is known for his support of Mireille Mathieu in many compositions and recordings. In 1969, he wrote the score for director René Clément's film, Rider On The Rain ("Le Passager de la Pluie"). It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc in September 1971.
  
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  Francis Poulenc
  Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (French pronunciation: [fʁɑ̃sis ʒɑ̃ maʁsɛl pulɛ̃k]) (7 January 1899 – 30 January 1963) was a French composer and a member of the French group Les Six. He composed solo piano music, chamber music, oratorio, choral music, opera, ballet music, and orchestral music. Critic Claude Rostand, in a July 1950 Paris-Presse article, coined the term "half monk, half thug" (translated by Ivry from "le moine et le voyou"), a phrase that would often be used to describe Poulenc.
  Poulenc was born in Paris in 1899. His father Emile Poulenc was a second generation director of the Poulenc, and later Rhône-Poulenc, chemical corporation. His mother, an amateur pianist, taught him to play. He was introduced to Ricardo Viñes in 1914, a champion of the music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and became his pupil shortly afterwards. He was a capable pianist, and the keyboard dominated his early compositions.
  In 1916 a childhood friend, Raymonde Linossier (1897-1930), introduced Poulenc to Adrienne Monnier's bookshop, the Maison des Amis des Livres. There he met avant-garde poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon. He was to set many of their poems to music.
  
  wn.com/Francis_Poulenc
• Frank Churchill
  Frank Churchill (October 20, 1901 – May 14, 1942) was an American composer of popular music for films. He wrote most of the music for Disney's 1937 movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, including "Whistle While You Work" and "Some Day My Prince Will Come". The latter became a jazz standard covered by various jazz greats including Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck.
  Churchill began his career playing piano in cinemas at the age of 15. After dropping out of medical studies at UCLA to pursue a career in music, he became an accompanist at the Los Angeles radio station KNX (AM) in 1924.
  He joined Disney studios in 1930, and scored many animated shorts - his song for The Three Little Pigs, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf", was a huge commercial success.
  In 1937, he was chosen to score Disney's first full-length animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. His catchy, artfully written songs played a large part in the film's initial success and continuing popularity.
  He became supervisor of music at Disney. In 1942, Churchill and fellow composer Oliver Wallace won an Oscar in the category "Scoring of a Musical Picture" for cowriting the score for Dumbo. He also shared an Oscar nomination with Ned Washington for the song "Baby Mine" from Dumbo for Best Song. A year later, Churchill received two posthumous Oscar nominations; the first for cowriting the score to Bambi with Edward Plumb, and the second for cowriting the song "Love is a Song" from Bambi with lyricist Larry Morey (1905–1971).
  
  wn.com/Frank_Churchill
• Frank St. Leger
  Douglas Francis "Frank" St. Leger (May 30, 1890–December 26, 1969) was a British-American conductor of Indian birth. During the 1930s he served three seasons as music director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra.
  St. Leger was born in Madras, today's Chennai, India, to British parents. At 16, he entered the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he studied piano and conducting. He was graduated with several honors.
  Between 1912 and 1914, St. Leger toured as the pianist for the Cherniavsky Trio. He served in the Australian army for two years, following which he was appointed the pianist and conductor for the opera singer Dame Nellie Melba. His position with Melba brought St. Leger to the United States in 1917. Subsequently he held positions with the American Opera Company, the Royal Opera at Covent Garden in London, and, beginning in 1929, a staff position with the Civic Opera of Chicago. In 1932 St. Leger was engaged as the music director of the Houston Symphony. He resigned following the season of 1934-1935. Following a position directing the Central City Opera in Colorado, St. Leger accepted, in 1939, a position as an assistant conductor for the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He remained at the Metropolitan for the following eleven years, holding subsequent positions as regular conductor, musical secretary, and company assistant manager in charge of repertory.
  
  wn.com/Frank_St._Leger
• Fred Ebb
  Fred Ebb (April 8, 1928 – September 11, 2004) was an American musical theatre lyricist who had many successful collaborations with composer John Kander. The Kander and Ebb team frequently wrote for such performers as Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera.
  Ebb was born in Manhattan to a Jewish family, the son of Anna Evelyn (née Gritz) and Harry Ebb. He worked during the early 1950s bronzing baby shoes, as a trucker's assistant, and was also employed in a department store credit office and at a hosiery company. He graduated from New York University with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature, and also earned his Master’s Degree in English from Columbia University.
  One of his early collaborators was Phil Springer, and a song they wrote together ("I Never Loved Him Anyhow") was recorded by Carmen McRae in 1956. Another song Ebb wrote with Springer was "Heartbroken" (1953), which was recorded by Judy Garland, the mother of his future protégée, Liza Minnelli. Other Springer-Ebb tunes include "Moonlight Gambler" and "Nevertheless I Never Lost the Blues". "Don't Forget", which he wrote with Norman Leyden, was recorded by singer Eddy Arnold in 1954.
  
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  Frederic Archer
  Frederic Archer (16 June 1838 – 22 October 1901) was a British, composer, conductor and organist, born at Oxford, England. He studied music in London and Leipzig, and held musical positions in England and Scotland until 1880, when he was became organist of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York. Archer was later appointed conductor of the Boston, Massachusetts Oratorio Society, director of Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and in 1899 organist of the Church of the Ascension in Pittsburgh. In 1896 he established the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. He founded, in 1885, The Keynote, which for a time he edited, and also published several books and numerous organ compositions.
  
  
  
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• Frederick Loewe
  Frederick Loewe (/ˈloʊ/, originally German Friedrich (Fritz) Löwe [ˈløːvə]; June 10, 1901 – February 14, 1988), was an Austrian-American composer. He collaborated with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner on the long running Broadway musicals My Fair Lady and Camelot, with book and lyrics by Lerner, both of which were made into films.
  Loewe was born in Berlin, Germany, to Viennese parents Edmond and Rosa Loewe. His father was a noted Jewish operetta star who performed throughout Europe and in North and South America; he starred as Count Danilo in the original production of The Merry Widow.
  Frederick Loewe grew up in Berlin and attended a Prussian cadet school from the age of five until he was thirteen. At an early age Loewe learned to play piano by ear and helped his father rehearse, and he began composing songs at age seven. He eventually attended a music conservatory in Berlin, one year behind virtuoso Claudio Arrau, and studied with Ferruccio Busoni and Eugene d'Albert. He won the coveted Hollander Medal awarded by the school and gave performances as a concert pianist while still in Germany. At 13, he was the youngest piano soloist ever to appear with the Berlin Philharmonic.
  
  wn.com/Frederick_Loewe
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  Fritz Reiner
  Frederick Martin “Fritz” Reiner (December 19, 1888 – November 15, 1963) was a prominent conductor of opera and symphonic music in the twentieth century. Hungarian born and trained, he emigrated to the United States, in 1922, where he rose to prominence as a conductor with several orchestras. He reached the pinnacle of his career, while music director with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the 1950s and early 1960s.
  Reiner was born in Budapest, Hungary into a secular Jewish family that resided in the Pest area of the city. After preliminary studies in law at his father’s urging, Reiner pursued the study of piano, piano pedagogy, and composition at the Franz Liszt Academy. During his last two years there his piano teacher was the young Béla Bartók. After early engagements at opera houses in Budapest and Dresden where he worked closely with Richard Strauss, he moved to the United States of America in 1922 to take the post of Principal Conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. He remained until 1931, having become a naturalized citizen in 1928, then began to teach at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where his pupils included Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss. He conducted the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra from 1938 to 1948 and made a few recordings with them for Columbia Records, then spent several years at the Metropolitan Opera, where he conducted a historic production of Strauss's Salome in 1949, with the Bulgarian soprano Ljuba Welitsch in the title role, and the American premiere of Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress in 1951. He also conducted and made a recording of the famous 1952 Metropolitan Opera production of Bizet's Carmen, starring Rise Stevens. The production was telecast on closed circuit television that year. At the time of his death he was preparing the Met's new production of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.
  
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  Georg Schnéevoigt
  Georg Schnéevoigt (8 November 1872 – 28 November 1947) was a Finnish conductor and cellist, born in Vyborg, Grand Duchy of Finland, which is now in Russia.
  Schnéevoigt began his career as a cellist performing throughout Europe in the 1890s. He was principal cellist of the Helsinki Philharmonic from 1896 to 1902. After this, he conducted many orchestras including the Kaim Orchestra (now the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra), Riga Philharmonic Orchestra which he founded, the Stockholm Concert Society (later the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra), the Sydney Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. From 1930 until his death in 1947, Schnéevoigt was chief conductor of the Malmö Symphony Orchestra.
  Schnéevoigt was a close friend of composer Jean Sibelius and often performed Sibelius's orchestral music. He conducted the first performance in Finland of Luonnotar in January 1914. He discovered the manuscripts of Sibelius's pieces Lemminkäinen and the Maidens, and Lemminkäinen in Tuonela, which had been thought lost, and gave their first performance since 1894. He also made the first recording of Sibelius's Symphony No. 6.
  
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  George Gershwin
  George Gershwin (September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937) was an American composer and pianist. Gershwin's compositions spanned both popular and classical genres, and his most popular melodies are widely known. Among his best known works are the orchestral compositions Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris, as well as the opera Porgy and Bess.
  Born in Brooklyn to a Ukrainian father of Jewish descent and a Russian mother, Gershwin studied piano under Charles Hambitzer and composition with Rubin Goldmark and Henry Cowell. He began his career as a song plugger, but soon thereafter started composing Broadway theatre works with his brother Ira Gershwin and Buddy DeSylva. He moved to Paris in an attempt to study with Nadia Boulanger, where he began to compose An American in Paris. After returning to New York City, he wrote Porgy and Bess with Ira and author DuBose Heyward. Initially a commercial failure, Porgy and Bess is now considered one of the most important American operas of the Twentieth Century. Gershwin moved to Hollywood and composed numerous film scores until his death in 1937 from a brain tumor.
  
  wn.com/George_Gershwin
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  Georges Delerue
  Georges Delerue (12 March 1925 – 20 March 1992) was a French composer who composed over 350 scores for cinema and television. Delerue won numerous important film music awards, including an Academy Award for A Little Romance (1980), three César Awards (1979, 1980, 1981), two ASCAP Awards (1988, 1990), and one Gemini Award for Sword of Gideon (1987). He was also nominated for four additional Academy Awards for Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), The Day of the Dolphin (1973), Julia (1977), and Agnes of God (1985), four additional César Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and one Genie Award for Black Robe (1991).
  The French newspaper Le Figaro named him "the Mozart of cinema." Delerue was the first composer to win three consecutive César Awards for Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1979), Love on the Run (1980), and The Last Metro (1981). Georges Delerue was named Commander of Arts and Letters, one of France's highest honours.
  Georges Delerue was born 12 March 1925 in Roubaix, France to Georges Delerue and Marie Lhoest. He was raised in a musical household; his grandfather lead an amateur chorale group and his mother sang and played piano at family gatherings. By the age of fourteen he was playing clarinet at the local music conservatory. In 1940 he was forced to abandon his studies at the Turgot Institute in order to work at a factory to help support his family. He continued playing clarinet with local bands, eventually transitioning to piano under the instruction of Madame Picavet-Bacquart. He studied Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, and Grieg, and was particularly inspired by Richard Strauss. Following a long convalescence after being diagnosed with scoliosis, Georges decided to become a composer.
  
  wn.com/Georges_Delerue
• Georgie Stoll
  Georgie Stoll (7 May 1905, Minneapolis, MN - 18 January 1985, Monterey, CA) was a musical director, conductor, composer and jazz violinist, associated with the Golden Age of MGM musicals and performers from the 1940s to 1960s. Born George Martin Stoll, he was also later credited as George E. Stoll (sometimes without the middle initial).
  Stoll made his musical debut as a boy violin prodigy, gaining nationwide fame. He toured North America as a jazz violinist on the Fanchon and Marco circuit and was part of the Jazzmania Quintet, appearing with Edythe Flynn in an early 1927 sound short. In San Diego, he became an orchestra and trio leader (his Rhythm Aces) and started to feature with Jack Oakie on radio programs, such as Camel Cigarette and NBC's Shell Oil Program. In 1934, Bing Crosby selected Stoll as his musical director for the second series of the CBS Woodbury radio programs. For Decca, Georgie Stoll and His Orchestra accompanied Crosby and Louis Armstrong in the successful 1936 recordings of Pennies from Heaven. Stoll and his orchestra appeared on screen the same year in MGM's Swing Banditry.
  
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  Gershwin
  George Gershwin (September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937) was an American composer and pianist. Gershwin's compositions spanned both popular and classical genres, and his most popular melodies are widely known. Among his best known works are the orchestral compositions Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris, as well as the opera Porgy and Bess.
  Born in Brooklyn to a Ukrainian father of Jewish descent and a Russian mother, Gershwin studied piano under Charles Hambitzer and composition with Rubin Goldmark and Henry Cowell. He began his career as a song plugger, but soon thereafter started composing Broadway theatre works with his brother Ira Gershwin and Buddy DeSylva. He moved to Paris in an attempt to study with Nadia Boulanger, where he began to compose An American in Paris. After returning to New York City, he wrote Porgy and Bess with Ira and author DuBose Heyward. Initially a commercial failure, Porgy and Bess is now considered one of the most important American operas of the Twentieth Century. Gershwin moved to Hollywood and composed numerous film scores until his death in 1937 from a brain tumor.
  
  wn.com/Gershwin
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  Ginger Rogers
  Ginger Rogers (July 16, 1911 – April 25, 1995) was an American actress, dancer, and singer who appeared in film, and on stage, radio, and television throughout much of the 20th century.
  During her long career, she made a total of 73 films, and was best known as Fred Astaire's romantic interest and dancing partner in a series of ten Hollywood musical films that revolutionized the genre. She achieved great success on her own in a variety of film roles and won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Kitty Foyle (1940). She ranks #14 on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars list of actress screen legends.
  Rogers was born Virginia Katherine McMath in Independence, Missouri, the only child of William Eddins McMath, an electrical engineer, and his wife, Lela Emogene (née Owens; 1891–1977). Ginger's parents separated soon after her birth, and she and her mother went to live with her grandparents, Walter and Saphrona (née Ball) Owens, in nearby Kansas City. Rogers' parents fought over her custody. After her mother denied him visitation, her father reportedly absconded with his daughter twice. After her parents divorced, Rogers stayed with her grandparents while her mother wrote scripts for two years in Hollywood. Rogers was to remain close to her grandfather (much later, when she was a star in 1939, she bought him a home at 5115 Greenbush Avenue in Sherman Oaks, California so that he could be close to her while she was filming at the studios).^{[citation needed]}
  
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  Giorgio Moroder
  Hansjörg "Giorgio" Moroder, named on record sleeves often only Giorgio (born 26 April 1940, Urtijëi, South Tyrol, Italy) is an Italian (of Ladin ethnicity) record producer, songwriter and performer based in Los Angeles. When in Munich in the 1970s, he started his own record label called Oasis Records, which several years later became a subdivision of Casablanca Records. He collaborated with Donna Summer during the era of disco (including "Love to Love You Baby" and "I Feel Love") and is the founder of the former Musicland Studios in Munich, which was used as a recording studio by artists including the Electric Light Orchestra, Led Zeppelin, Queen and Elton John.
  In addition to producing several hits with Donna Summer, Moroder also produced a number of electronic disco hits for The Three Degrees, two albums for Sparks, a handful of songs on Bonnie Tyler's album Bitterblue as well as her 1985 single "Here She Comes" and a score of songs for performers including David Bowie, Irene Cara, Madleen Kane, Melissa Manchester, Blondie, Japan, and France Joli.
  
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  Gregory Peck
  Eldred Gregory Peck (April 5, 1916 – June 12, 2003) was an American actor.
  One of the world's most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1960s, Peck continued to play important roles well into the 1980s. His notable performances include that of Atticus Finch in the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird, for which he won an Academy Award. President Lyndon Johnson honored Peck with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 for his lifetime humanitarian efforts. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Peck among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time, ranking at #12. He was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1983.
  Eldred Gregory Peck was born in La Jolla, California, the son of Missouri-born Bernice Mae "Bunny" (née Ayres) and Gregory Pearl Peck, who was a chemist and pharmacist. Peck's father was of Irish (maternal) heritage and English (paternal) heritage, and his mother was of Scots (paternal) and English (maternal) ancestry. Peck's father was a Catholic and his mother converted upon marrying his father. Peck's Irish-born paternal grandmother, Catherine Ashe, was related to Thomas Ashe, who took part in the Easter Rising fewer than three weeks after Peck's birth and died while on hunger strike in 1917. Peck's parents divorced by the time he was six years old and he spent the next few years being raised by his maternal grandmother.
  
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  Gustav Mahler
  Gustav Mahler (German pronunciation: [ˈɡʊstaf ˈmaːlɐ]; 7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) was a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation. He was born in the village of Kalischt, Bohemia, in what was then the Austrian Empire, now Kaliště in the Czech Republic. Then his family moved to nearby Iglau (now Jihlava) where Mahler grew up.
  As a composer, he acted as a bridge between the 19th century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945 the music was discovered and championed by a new generation of listeners; Mahler then became one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers, a position he has sustained into the 21st century.
  Born in humble circumstances, Mahler displayed his musical gifts at an early age. After graduating from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878, he held a succession of conducting posts of rising importance in the opera houses of Europe, culminating in his appointment in 1897 as director of the Vienna Court Opera (Hofoper). During his ten years in Vienna, Mahler—who had converted to Catholicism from Judaism to secure the post—experienced regular opposition and hostility from the anti-Semitic press. Nevertheless, his innovative productions and insistence on the highest performance standards ensured his reputation as one of the greatest of opera conductors, particularly as an interpreter of the stage works of Wagner and Mozart. Late in his life he was briefly director of New York's Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.
  
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  Gustavo Dudamel
  Gustavo Adolfo Dudamel Ramírez (born January 26, 1981) is a Venezuelan conductor and violinist. He is the principal conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony in Gothenburg, Sweden, and music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Los Angeles, California. Dudamel is also the artistic director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela.
  Dudamel was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, the son of a trombonist and a voice teacher. He studied music from an early age, becoming involved with El Sistema, the famous Venezuelan musical education program, and took up the violin at age ten. He soon began to study composition. He attended the Jacinto Lara Conservatory, where he was taught the violin by José Luis Jiménez. He then went on to work with José Francisco del Castillo at the Latin-American Violin Academy. He began to study conducting in 1995, first with Rodolfo Saglimbeni, then later with José Antonio Abreu. In 1999, he was appointed music director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar, the national youth orchestra of Venezuela, and toured several countries. He attended Charles Dutoit's master class in Buenos Aires in 2002, and worked as assistant for Simon Rattle in Berlin and Salzburg in 2003.
  
  wn.com/Gustavo_Dudamel
• Hamilton Harty
  Sir (Herbert) Hamilton Harty (4 December 1879 – 19 February 1941) was an Irish composer, conductor, pianist and organist.
  After an early career as a church organist in his native Ireland, Harty moved to London at about age 20, soon becoming a well-known piano accompanist. The Musical Times called him "the prince of accompanists". As a composer he wrote throughout his career, many of his works being well received, though few are regularly performed in the 21st century.
  In his career as a conductor, which began in 1904, Harty was particularly noted as an interpreter of the music of Berlioz. From 1920 to 1933 he was the chief conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, which he returned to the high standards and critical acclaim that it had enjoyed under its founder, Charles Hallé. His last permanent post was with the London Symphony Orchestra, but it lasted only two years, from 1932 to 1934. During his conducting career, Harty made some recordings with his orchestras. Shortly after his dismissal by the LSO, Harty began to suffer the symptoms of a brain tumour. After surgery, he resumed his career until 1940, but the tumour returned to cause his death at the age of 61.
  
  wn.com/Hamilton_Harty
• Hans Graf
  Hans Graf (born 15 February 1949 in Marchtrenk, Austria) is an Austrian conductor.
  As a child, Graf learned the violin and the piano. He studied at the Musikhochschule in Graz, Austria, and graduated with diplomas in piano and conducting. He also participated in conducting master classes with Franco Ferrara, Sergiu Celibidache and Arvīds Jansons. He received a state scholarship at the Leningrad Conservatory with Arvid Jansons. For the season 1975/1976 Graf was music director of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra in Baghdad. After winning the Karl Böhm conductor's competition in 1979, he made his debut at the Vienna State Opera in 1981 with Stravinsky's Petrouchka.
  Graf was music director of the Mozarteum Orchestra of Salzburg from 1984 to 1994, where he recorded the complete symphonies and other works by Mozart. From 1995 to 2003, Graf was music director of the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra. He was also music director of the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine, France, from 1998 to 2004.
  
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  Harold Arlen
  Harold Arlen (February 15, 1905 - April 23, 1986) was an American composer of popular music, having written over 500 songs, a number of which have become known the world over. In addition to composing the songs for The Wizard of Oz, including the classic 1938 song, "Over the Rainbow,” Arlen is a highly regarded contributor to the Great American Songbook. "Over the Rainbow," in fact, was voted the twentieth century's No. 1 song by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
  Arlen was born Hyman Arluck, in Buffalo, New York, the child of a Jewish cantor. His twin brother died the next day. He learned the piano as a youth and formed a band as a young man. He achieved some local success as a pianist and singer and moved to New York City in his early 20s. He worked as an accompanist in vaudeville. At this point, he changed his name to Harold Arlen. Between 1926 and about 1934, Arlen appeared occasionally as a band vocalist on records by The Buffalodians, Red Nichols, Joe Venuti, Leo Reisman and Eddie Duchin, usually singing his own compositions.
  
  wn.com/Harold_Arlen
• Harold Nicholas
  Harold Lloyd Nicholas (March 27, 1921 – July 3, 2000) was an American dancer specializing in tap. He was the younger half of the world famous tap dancing pair the Nicholas Brothers, known as two of the world's greatest dancers. His older brother was Fayard Nicholas. Harold was married to actress Dorothy Dandridge from 1942 to 1951.
  Nicholas was born to drummer and orchestra leader Ulysses Domonick and pianist Viola Harden in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. By the age of three, his older brother Fayard enjoyed sitting in the audience of the black vaudeville theater where his parents performed, enraptured by the great performers on stage. Immersed in show business, when the Nicholases added a second son to the family, seven-year-old Fayard insisted that the child be named after his idol, Harold Lloyd, the silent screen comedian. Soon after Harold was born the two brothers began dancing. They quickly gained acclaim for their elegant acrobatic moves and mastery of tap. When Fayard turned 16 and Harold 9, they had made their first appearance at the legendary Cotton Club in New York City. They were popular immediately.
  
  wn.com/Harold_Nicholas
• Harold Prince
  Harold Smith "Hal" Prince (born January 30, 1928) is an American theatrical producer and director associated with many of the best-known Broadway musical productions of the past half-century. He has garnered twenty-one Tony Awards, more than any other individual, including eight for directing, eight for producing the year's Best Musical, two as Best Producer of a Musical, and three special awards.
  Prince wasCole was her born in New York City to Milton A. Prince, a stockbroker, and Blanche Stern. He entered the University of Pennsylvania at age 16, where he followed a liberal arts curriculum and graduated three years later. He later served two years with the United States Army in post-WWII Germany.
  Prince began work in the theatre as an assistant stage manager to theatrical producer and director George Abbott. Along with Abbott, he co-produced The Pajama Game, which won the 1955 Tony Award for Best Musical. He went on to direct his own productions in 1962 beginning with A Family Affair and hit a series of unsuccessful productions.
  
  wn.com/Harold_Prince
• Harold Shapero
  Harold Samuel Shapero (born 29 April 1920) is an American composer.
  Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, Shapero and his family later moved to nearby Newton. He learned to play the piano as a child, and for some years was a pianist in dance orchestras. With a friend, he founded the Hal Kenny Orchestra, a swing-era jazz band.
  He was more interested in classical music, though. In his teens he studied with some famous teachers, including Nicolas Slonimsky (editor of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians) in 1936, and Ernst Krenek in 1937. At 18 he was ready to attend Harvard, where he studied composition with Walter Piston in 1938, and Paul Hindemith in 1940.
  Tanglewood, a now cherished musical institution, was founded in the 1940s, and Shapero was one of its first students. When Igor Stravinsky was Norton Professor at Harvard in 1940, Shapero showed Stravinsky his Nine-Minute Overture.^{[citation needed]} Shapero hoped to get the Overture played at Tanglewood in the summer of that year, but Hindemith ordered that no student compositions would be played that season. Fortunately, Aaron Copland hastily put together an Orchestra just to play student compositions deemed worthy, including Shapero's Overture.^{[citation needed]} Shapero was awarded the Rome Prize in 1941 for his Nine-Minute Overture, but World War II prevented him from taking residency in Italy.
  
  wn.com/Harold_Shapero
• Heinrich Schiff
  Heinrich Schiff (born 18 November 1951, Gmunden, Austria) is an Austrian cellist and conductor. He studied cello with Tobias Kühne and André Navarra and made his solo debut in Vienna and London in 1971. He studied conducting with Hans Swarovsky,^{[clarification needed]} and made his conducting debut in 1986.
  Schiff was Artistic Director of the Northern Sinfonia from 1990 to 1996, and recorded with them for the NMC label. He also held chief conductorships with the Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra in Copenhagen, Denmark(1996–2000), and the Orchester Musikkollegium Winterthur.
  In 2004, he was appointed Chief Conductor of the Vienna Chamber Orchestra and served in the post from 2005 to 2008. He stood down from the post in 2008 for health reasons.
  Schiff plays the "Mara" Stradivarius (1711) and "Sleeping Beauty" made by Montagnana in Venice in 1739. His recording of the Bach Cello Suites won prizes, and his recording of the Shostakovich concertos won the Grand Prix du Disque. His recording of the Brahms Double Concerto with Frank Peter Zimmermann and Wolfgang Sawallisch won the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis. Composers who have written cello concertos for Schiff include John Casken and Friedrich Cerha. Among his students is Rudi Spring.
  
  wn.com/Heinrich_Schiff
• Heinz Eric Roemheld
  Heinz Roemheld (May 1, 1901 – February 11, 1985) was an American composer.
  Born Heinrich Erich Roemheld in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he was one of four children of German immigrant Heinrich Roemheld and his wife Fanny Rauterberg Roemheld. Heinrich was a pharmacist, but all the members of the family were musical. Heinrich's brother Edgar (1898-1964) became a conductor, while sister Irmgard (1904-1995) became a well-known Milwaukee music teacher and radio broadcaster.
  Roemheld was a child prodigy who began playing the piano at the age of 4. He graduated from the Milwaukee College of Music at 19, and performed in theaters to earn money to study piano in Europe. In 1920, he went to Berlin, where he studied with Hugo Kaun, Ferruccio Busoni, and Egon Petri. While he was there, he appeared in concert with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
  When he returned to America, Roemheld became involved in recording music for silent movies, both as a pianist and as a conductor. In 1925, he was sent back to Berlin as head of Universal Pictures theaters there, but he had to leave Germany in 1929 because of the rise of Nazism.
  
  wn.com/Heinz_Eric_Roemheld
• Henry Mancini
  Enrico Nicola "Henry" Mancini (April 16, 1924 – June 14, 1994) was an American composer, conductor and arranger, best remembered for his film and television scores. He won a record number of Grammy Awards (20), plus a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award posthumously in 1995. His best-known works include the jazz-idiom theme to The Pink Panther film series ("The Pink Panther Theme"), the Peter Gunn Theme from the television series, and back-to-back Academy Awards for the songs "Moon River" from the Blake Edwards film Breakfast at Tiffany's and "Days of Wine and Roses" from Edwards' film Days of Wine and Roses. He also composed the score of famous films such as Charade, The Great Race, Wait Until Dark or Silver Streak.
  Mancini was born in the Little Italy neighborhood of Cleveland, and grew up near Pittsburgh, in the steel town of West Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. His parents emigrated from the Abruzzo region of Italy. Mancini's father, Quinto, (born March 13, 1893, Scanno, Italy) was a steelworker, who made his only child begin piccolo lessons at the age of eight. When Mancini was 12 years old, he began piano lessons. Quinto and Henry played flute together in the Aliquippa Italian immigrant band, "Sons of Italy". After graduating from Aliquippa High School in 1942, Mancini attended the renowned Juilliard School of Music in New York. In 1943, after roughly one year at Juilliard, his studies were interrupted when he was drafted into the United States Army. In 1945, he participated in the liberation of a concentration camp in southern Germany.
  
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  Horace Silver
  Horace Silver (born September 2, 1928), born Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silva in Norwalk, Connecticut, is an American jazz pianist and composer.
  Silver is known for his distinctive humorous and funky playing style and for his pioneering compositional contributions to hard bop. He was influenced by a wide range of musical styles, notably gospel music, African music, and Latin American music and sometimes ventured into the soul jazz genre.
  His father, who was known as John Tavares Silva, was from the island of Maio in Cape Verde. His mother was born in New Canaan, Connecticut, and was of Irish-African descent.
  Silver began his career as a tenor saxophonist but later switched to piano. His tenor saxophone playing was highly influenced by Lester Young, and his piano style by Bud Powell. Silver was discovered in the Sundown Club in Hartford, Connecticut. in 1950 by saxophonist Stan Getz. Getz was playing at the club with Silver’s trio backing him up. Getz liked Silver’s band and brought them on the road, eventually recording three of Silver’s compositions. It was with Getz that Silver made his recording debut.
  
  wn.com/Horace_Silver
• Hugo Friedhofer
  Hugo Wilhelm Friedhofer (May 3, 1901 – May 17, 1981) was an American film music composer born in San Francisco. His father was a cellist trained in Dresden, Germany; his mother, Eva König, was born in Germany.
  Friedhofer began playing cello at the age of 13. After taking lessons in harmony and counterpoint at University of California, Berkeley, he was employed as a cellist for the People's Symphony Orchestra.
  Because he could speak German, Warner Bros. assigned Friedhofer to work with the Austrian composers Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner. Despite his own strong skills, he remained in their shadow for many years.
  In 1929, he relocated to Hollywood, where he performed as a musician for Fox Studios productions such as Sunny Side Up (1920) and Grand Canary (1934). Later, he was hired as an orchestrator for Warner Bros. and worked on over 50 films for the studio. While at Warners, he largely worked with Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Steiner, in particular, relied on Friedhofer's skill in turning his sketches into a full orchestral score.
  
  wn.com/Hugo_Friedhofer
• In Tua Nua
  In Tua Nua was an Irish rock group who achieved a modicum of fame and success in both Ireland and Europe throughout the late 1980s. Their name is a phonetic spelling of the Irish An Tuath Nua, "the new tribe."
  The group was formed by Leslie Dowdall, Jack Dublin, Vinny Kilduff, Ivan O'Shea, Martin Clancy, Paul Byrne and Steve Wickham in the early 1980s. Although the group's focus and pretensions were an early Roxy Music-style rock, it combined this aspiration with ersatz folk and traditional Irish music in the form of uillean pipes and acoustic guitars, laced together with raw vocals and electronic violin. The latter instrumentation was at times was little more than a pastiche of the playing of Eddie Jobson on Roxy Music's Country Life album.
  In 1984, the band were the first to sign to U2's Mother label and released their first single "Coming Thru". Shortly afterwards Island Records signed the band. A number of singles were released and a debut album recorded. The first Island single was the critically acclaimed "Take My Hand", co-written by a young Sinéad O'Connor. This was followed by a second single, a cover of Jefferson Airplane's hit "Somebody to Love".
  
  wn.com/In_Tua_Nua
• Irwin Kostal
  Irwin Kostal (October 1, 1911 - November 23, 1994) was an American musical arranger of films and an orchestrator of Broadway musicals.
  Born in Chicago, Illinois, Kostal opted not to attend college, instead teaching himself musical arranging by studying the symphonic scores available at his local library. His first professional job was as a staff arranger for Design for Listening, an NBC radio show based in his hometown.
  After moving to New York City, Kostal was hired for Sid Caesar's popular variety series Your Show of Shows, and followed this with a stint at The Garry Moore Show. In the latter part of the decade he began working on Broadway, orchestrating for Shinbone Alley, The Music Man, Fiorello!, and West Side Story. His work on the latter resulted in his being hired to score the 1961 screen adaptation with Saul Chaplin, Johnny Green, and Sid Ramin. The quartet won both an Oscar and a Grammy Award for their contributions. Kostal later went on to collaborate with Saul Chaplin for the 1965 film adaptation of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music and won an Oscar for Best Music Scoring.
  
  wn.com/Irwin_Kostal
• Issay Dobrowen
  Issay Alexandrovich Dobrowen (Russian: Исай Александрович Добровейн) (27 February [O.S. 15 February] 1891 – 9 December 1953) was a Russian-Norwegian pianist, composer and conductor.
  He was born Itschok Zorachovitch Barabeitchik in Nizhny Novgorod, Russian Empire of Jewish parents. He left the Soviet Union in 1922, and became a Norwegian citizen in 1929.
  He once played Beethoven's Sonata Appassionata to Vladimir Lenin, whose favorite piece of music this was. Dobrowen directed the first German performance of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov (Dresden, 1922). Dobrowen went on to conduct the Oslo Philharmonic orchestra (1928-31), at the Sofia Opera (1927-28), and the San Francisco Symphony (1931-34) and the Gothenburg Symphony (1941-53) orchestras.
  Dobrowen worked with both Nikolai Medtner and Artur Schnabel, among other well-known musicians. He was also a close friend of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, and the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen.
  He conducted his last concert with the Oslo Philharmonic in December 1952. His last concert was held on 19 January 1953, when he conducted the Stuttgart Orchestra. He died 9 December 1953 in Oslo at the age of 62.
  
  wn.com/Issay_Dobrowen
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  Jack Lemmon
  John Uhler "Jack" Lemmon III (February 8, 1925 – June 27, 2001) was an American actor and musician. He starred in more than 60 films including Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Mister Roberts (for which he won the 1955 Best Supporting Actor Academy Award), Days of Wine and Roses, The Great Race, Irma la Douce, The Odd Couple, Save the Tiger (for which he won the 1973 Best Actor Academy Award), The Out-of-Towners, The China Syndrome, Missing (for which he won 'Best Actor' at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival), Glengarry Glen Ross, Grumpy Old Men and Grumpier Old Men.
  Lemmon was born in an elevator^{[citation needed]} at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He was the only child of Mildred Burgess LaRue (née Noel) and John Uhler Lemmon, Jr., who was the president of a doughnut company. Lemmon attended John Ward Elementary School in Newton and The Rivers School in Weston, Massachusetts. He had stated that he knew he wanted to be an actor from the age of eight. Lemmon attended Phillips Academy (Class of 1943) and Harvard University (Class of 1947), where he lived in Adams House and was an active member of several Drama Clubs - becoming president of the Hasty Pudding Club - as well as a member of the Delphic Club for Gentleman, a final club at Harvard. After Harvard, Lemmon joined the Navy, receiving V-12 training and serving as an ensign. On being discharged, he took up acting professionally, working on radio, television and Broadway. He studied acting under coach Uta Hagen. He also became enamored of the piano and learned to play it on his own. He could also play the harmonica, organ, and the double bass.
  
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  Jacques d'Amboise
  Jacques d'Amboise (born July 28, 1934) is an American danseur and choreographer.
  D'Amboise was born as Joseph Jacques Ahearn in Dedham, Massachusetts. He was a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, where ballets were especially created for him by famous choreographer George Balanchine. He has also choreographed ballets for the New York City Ballet.
  As well as ballets, d'Amboise danced in films, including Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, where he played the part of Ephraim, one of the brothers—and Carousel (1956), where he danced the ballet role of the Starlight Carnival barker in Louise's Ballet.
  D'Amboise founded National Dance Institute in 1976, which has been teaching school children how to dance for the past 30 years. A documentary film (He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin' ) about Jacques d'Amboise and National Dance Institute won an Academy Award. The NDI program often combines music and art with studies of other cultures, histories, and literature, offering a unique and comprehensive performing arts experience, while fostering curiosity and a sense of achievement.
  
  wn.com/Jacques_d'Amboise
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  Jason Robards
  Jason Nelson Robards, Jr. (July 26, 1922 – December 26, 2000) was an American actor on stage, and in film and television. He is a winner of the Tony Award, two Academy Awards and the Emmy Award. He was also a United States Navy combat veteran of World War II.
  He became famous playing works of Eugene O'Neill, an American playwright, and regularly performed in O'Neill's works throughout his career. Robards was cast in both common-man roles and as well-known historical figures.
  Robards was born in Chicago, the son of Hope Maxine (née Glanville) Robards and Jason Robards, Sr., an actor who regularly appeared on the stage and in such early films as The Gamblers (1929). Robards was of English, Welsh, Irish, and Swedish descent.
  The family moved to New York City, New York, when Jason Jr. was still a toddler, and then moved to Los Angeles, California, when he was six years old. Later interviews with Robards suggested that the trauma of his parents' divorce, which occurred during his grade-school years, greatly affected his personality and worldview.
  
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  Jerome Kern
  Jerome David Kern (January 27, 1885 – November 11, 1945) was an American composer of musical theatre and popular music. One of the most important American theatre composers of the early 20th century, he wrote more than 700 songs, used in over 100 stage works, including such classics as "Ol' Man River", "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man", "A Fine Romance", "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "All the Things You Are", "The Way You Look Tonight", "Long Ago (and Far Away)" and "Who?". He collaborated with many of the leading librettists and lyricists of his era, including George Grossmith Jr., Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, Dorothy Fields, Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin and E. Y. Harburg.
  A native New Yorker, Kern created dozens of Broadway musicals and Hollywood films in a career that lasted for more than four decades. His musical innovations, such as 4/4 dance rhythms and the employment of syncopation and jazz progressions, built on, rather than rejected, earlier musical theatre tradition. He and his collaborators also employed his melodies to further the action or develop characterization to a greater extent than in the other musicals of his day, creating the model for later musicals. Although dozens of Kern's musicals and musical films were hits, only Show Boat is now regularly revived. Songs from his other shows, however, are still frequently performed and adapted. Although Kern detested jazz arrangements of his songs, many have been adopted by jazz musicians to become standard tunes.
  
  wn.com/Jerome_Kern
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  Jerry Goldsmith
  Jerrald King "Jerry" Goldsmith (February 10, 1929 – July 21, 2004) was an American composer and conductor most known for his work in film and television scoring.
  He composed scores for such noteworthy films as The Sand Pebbles, Planet of the Apes, Patton, Chinatown, The Wind and the Lion, The Omen, The Boys from Brazil, Alien, Poltergeist, Gremlins, Hoosiers, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Rudy, Air Force One, L.A. Confidential, Mulan, The Mummy, three Rambo films, and five Star Trek films. He was nominated for six Grammy Awards, nine Golden Globes, four BAFTAs, and seventeen Academy Awards. In 1977 he was awarded an Oscar for The Omen.
  He collaborated with some of the most prolific directors in film history, including Robert Wise (The Sand Pebbles, Star Trek: The Motion Picture), Howard Hawks (Rio Lobo), Otto Preminger (In Harm's Way), Joe Dante (Gremlins, The 'Burbs, Small Soldiers), Roman Polanski (Chinatown), Ridley Scott (Alien, Legend), Steven Spielberg (Poltergeist, Twilight Zone: The Movie), and Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall, Basic Instinct). However, his most notable collaboration was arguably that with Franklin J. Schaffner, for whom Goldsmith scored such films as Planet of the Apes, Patton, Papillon, and The Boys from Brazil.
  
  wn.com/Jerry_Goldsmith
• Jessye Norman
  Jessye Norman (born September 15, 1945) is an American opera singer. Norman is a well-known contemporary opera singer and recitalist, and is among some of the most highly successful performers in classical music. A dramatic soprano, Norman is associated in particular with the Wagnerian repertoire, and with the roles of Sieglinde, Ariadne, Alceste, and Leonore.
  Jessye Mae Norman was born on September 15, 1945 in Augusta, Georgia to Silas Norman, an insurance salesman, and Janie King-Norman, a school teacher. She was one of five children in a family of amateur musicians; her mother and grandmother were both pianists, her father a singer in a local choir. Norman's mother insisted that she start piano lessons at an early age. Norman attended Charles T. Walker Elementary School, A.R. Johnson Junior High School, and Lucy C. Laney Senior High School, all in downtown Augusta.
  
  wn.com/Jessye_Norman
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  Joanne Woodward
  Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward (born February 27, 1930) is an American actress, television and theatrical producer, and widow of Paul Newman. She is perhaps best known for her Academy Award winning role in The Three Faces of Eve (1957).
  Woodward was born in Thomasville, Georgia, daughter of Elinor Gignilliat (née Trimmier) and Wade Woodward, Jr., who at one point was vice president of publisher Charles Scribner's Sons. Her middle name, "Gignilliat", originates from distant Huguenot ancestry. She was influenced to become an actress by her mother's love of movies. Her mother named her after Joan Crawford, using the Southern pronunciation of the name "Joanne". Attending the premiere of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta, nine-year-old Woodward rushed out into the parade of stars and sat on the lap of Laurence Olivier, star Vivien Leigh's partner and future husband. She eventually worked with Olivier in 1977, in a television production of Come Back, Little Sheba. During rehearsals, she mentioned this incident to him and he told her he remembered her doing it.
  
  wn.com/Joanne_Woodward
• Joe Renzetti
  Joe Renzetti is a film composer and American session musician.
  Joseph Renzetti - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Joe Renzetti studied composing and orchestrating under Nicholas Flagello, NYC, Manhattan School of Music. He studied guitar with Dennis Sandole, Joe Sgro, Sal Benigo, Lenny Payton, and Frank Tacconelli a disciple of the Eddie Lang school.
  In the early 60s, as a result of Dick Clark and American Bandstand, originating from Philly, Cameo-Parkway records came into existence. Renzetti became Cameo Records' house guitarist, and played on the hits "Let's Twist Again", " Dee Dee Sharp's "Mashed Potato Time"", "South Street", The "Limbo Rock", "Palisades Park, and "Tallahassee Lassie".
  Fascinated by the advances in recording technology, and the profession of arranging for records, in 1963 Renzetti moved to New York. There, he arranged the top-ten records "Sunny", by Bobby Hebb, "Ninety Eight Point Six", by Keith, "Apple, Peaches, Pumpkin Pie", by Jay & the Techniques, and "Mandy", by Barry Manilow.
  
  wn.com/Joe_Renzetti
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  Johan Halvorsen
  Johan Halvorsen (15 March 1864 – 4 December 1935) was a Norwegian composer, conductor and violinist.
  Born in Drammen, Norway he was an accomplished violinist from a very early age and became a prominent figure in Norwegian musical life. He received his musical education in Kristiania (now Oslo) and Stockholm, and was a concertmaster in Bergen before joining the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. He was a concertmaster in Aberdeen, Scotland, then a professor of music in Helsinki, and finally became a student once again, in St Petersburg, Leipzig (with Adolph Brodsky), Berlin (with Adolf Becker), and Liège (with César Thomson).
  Returning to Norway in 1893, he worked as conductor of the theatre orchestra at Den Nationale Scene in Bergen and of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. He became concertmaster of the Bergen Philharmonic in 1885, and principal conductor in 1893. In 1899 he was appointed conductor of the orchestra at the newly-opened National Theatre in Kristiania, a position he held for 30 years until his retirement in 1929.
  
  wn.com/Johan_Halvorsen
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  John Barbirolli
  Sir John Barbirolli, CH (2 December 1899 – 29 July 1970), né Giovanni Battista Barbirolli, was an English conductor and cellist. He is remembered above all as conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, which he helped save from dissolution in 1943 and conducted for the rest of his life. Earlier in his career he was Arturo Toscanini's successor as music director of the New York Philharmonic, serving from 1936 to 1943. He was also chief conductor of the Houston Symphony from 1961 to 1967, and was a guest conductor of many other orchestras, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic, with all of which he made recordings.
  Born in London of Italian and French parentage, Barbirolli grew up in a family of professional musicians. After starting out as a cellist, he was given the chance to conduct, from 1926 with the British National Opera Company, and then with Covent Garden's touring company. On taking up the conductorship of the Hallé he had less opportunity to work in the opera house, but in the 1950s he conducted productions of works by Verdi, Wagner, Gluck, and Puccini at Covent Garden with such success that he was invited to become the company's permanent musical director, an invitation he declined. Late in his career he made several recordings of operas, of which his 1967 set of Puccini's Madama Butterfly for EMI is probably the best known.
  
  wn.com/John_Barbirolli
• John Harbison
  John Harris Harbison (born December 20, 1938 in Orange, New Jersey) is an American composer, best known for his operas and large choral works.
  John Harris Harbison was born to the historian Elmore Harris Harbison and Janet German Harbison. The Harbisons were a musical family; Elmore had studied composition in his youth and Janet wrote songs. Harbison's sisters Helen and Margaret were musicians as well. He won the prestigious BMI Foundation's Student Composer Awards for composition at the age of sixteen in 1954. He studied music at Harvard University (BA 1960), where he sang with the Harvard Glee Club, and later at the Berlin Musikhochschule and at Princeton (MFA 1963). He is an Institute Professor of music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a former student of Walter Piston and Roger Sessions. His works include several symphonies, string quartets, and concerti for violin, viola, and bass viol (double bass).
  He won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1987 for The Flight into Egypt, and in 1989 he received a $305,000 MacArthur Fellowship. In 1998 he was awarded the 4th Annual Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities. In 2006 he was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance for his Mottetti di Montale.
  
  wn.com/John_Harbison
• John Kander
  John Harold Kander (born March 18, 1927) is the American composer of a number of musicals as part of the songwriting team of Kander and Ebb.
  Kander was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of Bernice (née Aaron) and Harold S. Kander. Kander attended The Pembroke Country-Day School and Oberlin College before earning a Master's degree at Columbia University where he was a protégé of Douglas Moore and studied composition with Jack Beeson.
  Kander began his Broadway career as substitute rehearsal pianist for West Side Story. The stage manager for West Side Story then asked Kander to play the auditions for her next show, Gypsy. During the auditions, Kander met the choreographer, Jerome Robbins, who suggested that Kander compose the dance music for the show in 1959. After that experience, he wrote dance arrangements for Irma la Douce in 1960.
  His first produced musical was A Family Affair, written with James and William Goldman. He met lyricist Fred Ebb in 1962 and began a songwriting collaboration that would last for more than four decades. Later that year rising star Barbra Streisand recorded two of the duo's songs, "My Coloring Book" and "I Don't Care Much." In 1965, Kander and Ebb landed their first show on Broadway, Flora the Red Menace, produced by Hal Prince, directed by George Abbott, and with book by George Abbott and Robert Russell,^{[disambiguation needed ]} in which Liza Minnelli made her initial Broadway appearance. Kander and Ebb have since been associated with writing material for both Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera, and have produced special material for their appearances live and on television.
  
  wn.com/John_Kander
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  John Williams
  John Towner Williams (born February 8, 1932) is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. In a career spanning almost six decades, he has composed some of the most recognizable film scores in the history of motion pictures, including the Star Wars saga, Jaws, Superman, the Indiana Jones films, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Hook, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, War Horse, Home Alone and the first three Harry Potter films. He has had a long association with director Steven Spielberg, composing the music for all but two (Duel and The Color Purple) of Spielberg's major feature films.
  Other notable works by Williams include theme music for four Olympic Games, NBC Sunday Night Football, the NBC Nightly News, the rededication of the Statue of Liberty, and the television series Lost in Space. Williams has also composed numerous classical concerti, and he served as the principal conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra from 1980 to 1993; he is now the orchestra's conductor laureate.
  Williams has won five Academy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, seven BAFTA Awards, and 21 Grammy Awards. With 47 Academy Award nominations, Williams is the second most nominated person, after Walt Disney. John Williams was honored with the prestigious Richard Kirk award at the 1999 BMI Film and TV Awards. The award is given annually to a composer who has made significant contributions to film and television music. Williams was inducted into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame in 2000, and was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004.
  
  wn.com/John_Williams
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  Johnny Carson
  John William "Johnny" Carson (October 23, 1925 – January 23, 2005) was an American television host and comedian, known for thirty years as host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962–1992). Carson received six Emmy Awards, the Governor Award, and a 1985 Peabody Award. He was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1987. Johnny Carson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992 and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1993.
  Although his show was already successful by the end of the 1960s, during the 1970s Carson became an American icon and remained so until his retirement in 1992. He adopted a casual, conversational approach with extensive interaction with guests, an approach pioneered by Arthur Godfrey and previous Tonight Show hosts Steve Allen and Jack Paar. Late night hosts David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Craig Ferguson, and Jimmy Fallon have all cited Carson's influence on their late-night talk shows, which resemble his in format and tone.
  Carson was born in Corning, Iowa, in the year 1925, to Homer Lloyd "Kit" Carson, a power company manager, and Ruth Hook Carson, who was of Irish descent. He grew up in the nearby towns of Avoca, Clarinda, and Red Oak in southwest Iowa before moving to Norfolk, Nebraska, at the age of eight. At the age of twelve, Carson found a book on magic at a friend's house and immediately purchased a mail-order magician's kit. He debuted as "The Great Carsoni" at fourteen and was paid $3; many other performances at local picnics and country fairs followed.
  
  wn.com/Johnny_Carson
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  Johnny Cash
  John R. "Johnny" Cash (February 26, 1932 – September 12, 2003), was an American singer-songwriter, actor, and author, who has been called one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. Although he is primarily remembered as a country music icon, his songs and sound spanned many other genres including rockabilly and rock and roll—especially early in his career—as well as blues, folk, and gospel. This crossover appeal led to Cash being inducted in the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Gospel Music Hall of Fame.
  Cash was known for his deep, distinctive bass-baritone voice; for the "boom-chicka-boom" sound of his Tennessee Three backing band; for his rebelliousness, coupled with an increasingly somber and humble demeanor; for providing free concerts inside prison walls; and for his dark performance clothing, which earned him the nickname "The Man in Black". He traditionally started his concerts by saying, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash." and usually following it up with his standard "Folsom Prison Blues".
  
  wn.com/Johnny_Cash
• Johnny Green
  Johnny Green (10 October 1908 – 15 May 1989) was an American songwriter, composer, musical arranger, and conductor. He was given the nickname "Beulah" by colleague Conrad Salinger. His most famous song was one of his earliest, "Body and Soul". Green was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972.
  John Waldo Green was born in New York City, the son of musical parents. He attended Horace Mann School and the New York Military Academy, and was accepted by Harvard at the age of 15, entering the University in 1924. His musical tutors were Herman Wasserman, Ignace Hilsberg and Walter Spalding. Between semesters, Bandleader Guy Lombardo heard his Harvard Gold Coast Orchestra and hired him to create dance arrangements for his nationally famous orchestra. His first song hit, Coquette (1928), was written for Lombardo (with Carmen Lombardo, Guy's brother, and lyricist Gus Kahn). Green was educated in music, history, economics, and government. His instruments were the piano and the trombone, although he abandoned the latter after college.
  
  wn.com/Johnny_Green
• Jonathan Tunick
  Jonathan Tunick (born April 19, 1938, New York City, New York) is an American orchestrator, musical director, and composer, one of eleven people to have won all four major American show business awards: the Tony Awards, Academy Awards, Emmy Awards and Grammy Awards. He has worked on most of the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, starting in 1970 with Company and ending with the 2010-11 revival of Follies.
  He graduated from the LaGuardia Performing Arts High School, and holds degrees from Bard College and the Juilliard School. Tunick's principal instrument is the clarinet.
  Much of his work has arisen from his involvement in theatre, and he is associated especially with the musicals of Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim said of Tunick's work: " 'I think he's tops'..." and further noted that "Tunick is a standout in his field not only because of his musicianship and imagination, but primarily because of 'his great sensitivity to theatrical atmosphere.' "
  Tunick also has a band, the "Broadway Moonlighters", which played at Birdland in March 2012 and in 2008 with Barbara Cook as his special guest. He has worked as an arranger and/or con­ductor on recordings with Judy Collins, Cleo Laine, Kiri Te Kanawa, Itzhak Perlman, Placido Domingo, Johnny Mathis, Barbra Streisand, Paul McCartney and Bernadette Peters. In his review of the Bernadette Peters recording Bernadette Peters Loves Rodgers and Hammerstein (Angel Records, 2002), John Kenrick wrote: "Jonathan Tunick provides the brilliant arrangements." Tunick won the Grammy Award as "Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s)/Best Background Arrangement" for his work on the song "No One Is Alone" from the Cleo Laine album Cleo Laine Sings Sondheim (RCA Victor, 1987).
  
  wn.com/Jonathan_Tunick
• Josef Krips
  Josef Alois Krips (8 April 1902 – 13 October 1974) was an Austrian conductor and violinist.
  Krips was born in Vienna and went on to become a pupil of Eusebius Mandyczewski and Felix Weingartner. From 1921 to 1924, he served as Weingartner's assistant at the Vienna Volksoper and as répétiteur and chorus master. Afterwards he became conductor of several orchestras, including a period as music director of the orchestra in Karlsruhe from 1926 to 1933. In 1933 he returned to Vienna as a resident conductor of the Volksoper. He also became a professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1935. He conducted regularly at the Salzburg Festival between 1935 and 1938.
  In 1938, the Nazi annexation of Austria (or Anschluss) forced Krips to leave the country. (Krips was raised a Roman Catholic, but would have been excluded from musical activity because his father was born Jewish). Krips moved to Belgrade, where he worked for a year with the Belgrade Opera and Philharmonic, until Yugoslavia also became involved in World War II. For the rest of the war he worked in a food factory.
  
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  José Antonio Abreu
  José Antonio Abreu (born May 7, 1939 in Valera) is a Venezuelan pianist, economist, educator, activist, and politician.
  Born in the city of Valera in 1939, Abreu graduated ¨Summa Cum Laude¨ as an Economist at Universidad Católica Andres Bello and he was awarded a PhD degree in Petroleum Economics from the same university in 1961. Abreu also did some graduate work at the University of Michigan. He served as a Deputy at the Chamber of Deputies in the Congress of Venezuela. After his political career, he also worked as a professor of economics and law at Universidad Simón Bolívar and his Alma Mater. He would return to politics briefly in 1983 to serve as Minister of Culture.
  Abreu began to study music with Doralisa Jiménez de Medina in Barquisimeto. Later, he attended the Caracas Musical Declamation Academy in 1957, where he studied piano with Moisés Moleiro, organ and harpsichord with Evencio Castellanos, and composition with Vicente Emilio Sojo. In 1967, he received the Symphonic Music National Prize for his musical ability. It was in 1975 that he founded El Sistema, formally known as the Foundation for the National Network of Youth and Children Orchestras of Venezuela.
  
  wn.com/José_Antonio_Abreu
• Judith Jamison
  Judith Ann Jamison (born May 10, 1943, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American dancer and choreographer, best known as the Artistic Director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
  
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  Jukka-Pekka Saraste
  Jukka-Pekka Saraste (born April 22, 1956, Lahti) is a Finnish conductor and violinist.
  Saraste was trained as a violinist. He later studied conducting at the Sibelius Academy with Jorma Panula, in the same class as Esa-Pekka Salonen and Osmo Vänskä. Before becoming a conductor, Saraste was co-principal second violinist and later an associate to Leif Segerstam, with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (RSO).
  In 1983, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Saraste co-founded the Avanti! Chamber Orchestra, which specialises in performances of contemporary music. In 2000, Saraste also founded the Ekenäs Summer Concerts-Festival with the Finnish Chamber Orchestra, and he is currently the artistic advisor to both Festival and Orchestra. Saraste has directed the Finnish Chamber orchestra on several tours, including tours in the United States and China.
  In 1987, Saraste became the chief conductor of the RSO, and held the position until 2001. In 1987, he also became the principal conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and remained with the orchestra until 1991. Saraste now holds the title of Conductor Laureate of the RSO. He has twice recorded the complete symphonies of Jean Sibelius with the RSO.
  
  wn.com/Jukka-Pekka_Saraste
• Jule Styne
  Jule Styne (December 31, 1905 – September 20, 1994) was a British-born American songwriter especially famous for a series of Broadway musicals, which included several very well known and frequently revived shows.
  Styne was born in London, England as Julius Kerwin Stein of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. At the age of eight he moved with his family to Chicago, where at an early age he began taking piano lessons. He proved to be a prodigy and performed with the Chicago, St. Louis, and Detroit Symphonies before he was ten years old.
  Styne attended Chicago Musical College, but before then he had already attracted attention of another teenager, Mike Todd, later a successful film producer, who commissioned him to write a song for a musical act that he was creating. It would be the first of over 1,500 published songs Styne would compose in his career.
  Styne established his own dance band, which brought him to the notice of Hollywood, where he was championed by Frank Sinatra and where he began a collaboration with lyricist Sammy Cahn, with whom he wrote many songs for the movies, including "It's Been a Long, Long Time" (#1 for 3 weeks for Harry James and His Orchestra in 1945), "Five Minutes More," and the Oscar-winning "Three Coins in the Fountain". He collaborated on the score for the 1955 musical film My Sister Eileen with Leo Robin. Ten of his songs were nominated for the Oscar, many written with Cahn, including "I've Heard That Song Before" (#1 for 13 weeks for Harry James and His Orchestra in 1943), "I'll Walk Alone", "It's Magic" (a #2 hit for Doris Day in 1948) and "I Fall in Love Too Easily".
  
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  Julie Andrews
  Dame Julia Elizabeth Andrews, DBE (née Wells; born 1 October 1935) is an English film and stage actress, singer, and author. She is the recipient of Golden Globe, Emmy, Grammy, BAFTA, People's Choice Award, Theatre World Award, Screen Actors Guild and Academy Award honours.
  Andrews is a former child actress and singer who made her Broadway debut in a 1954 production of The Boy Friend, and rose to prominence starring in musicals such as My Fair Lady and Camelot, both of which earned her Tony Award nominations. In 1957, she made her television debut with the title role in Cinderella, which was seen by over 100 million viewers.
  Andrews made her feature film debut in Mary Poppins (1964), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She received her second Academy Award nomination for The Sound of Music (1965). Adjusted for inflation, these two films are the 25th and 3rd highest grossing films of all time, respectively. From 1964 to 1967, Andrews was the biggest film star in the world, with the additional box office successes of her films The Americanization of Emily, Hawaii, Torn Curtain, and Thoroughly Modern Millie.
  
  wn.com/Julie_Andrews
• Julien Paul Blitz
  Julien Paul Blitz (May 21, 1885 – July 17, 1951) was an American cellist, conductor, and teacher. He was the first music director of the Houston Symphony.
  Blitz was born in Ghent, Belgium, the son of violinist and martinist Edouard E. Blitz (1860–1915) and pianist Mattie Louise Miller (1865–1904). He moved to the United States with his family at the age of two. He began violin studies with his father, who had been appointed the first music director of the Kansas City Philharmonic. He commenced musical studies in 1901 at the Ghent Conservatory, where he studied with Paul-Henri-Joseph Lebrun, Joseph Lampens, Joseph Jacobs, Leon Rinskoph, and Edouard Jacobs. Blitz made his debut in 1904 and graduated cum laude from the conservatory in 1905.
  Blitz was engaged as a cellist in the Kursaal Orchestra in Ostend, Belgium, then returned to the United States. He lived in New York City briefly, then accepted a position at Baylor College in Belton, Texas.
  In 1913, Blitz founded and became the first music director of the Houston Symphony; he also directed activities of the Houston Treble Clef Club. Blitz's tenure in Houston lasted until 1916. From 1917 to 1922, he conducted the San Antonio Symphony. In San Antonio Blitz was also the director of the Chaminade Choral Society of the Tuesday Musical Club. Subsequent positions held by Blitz include faculty positions at the San Antonio College of Music; Austin College and Kidd-Key College (where he was head of the string department), both in Sherman, Texas; the Fort Worth Conservatory, and, from 1934 until 1950, head of the music department at Texas Technological College (later Texas Tech University) in Lubbock.
  
  wn.com/Julien_Paul_Blitz
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  Katharine Hepburn
  Katharine Houghton Hepburn (May 12, 1907 – June 29, 2003) was an American actress of film, stage, and television. Known for her headstrong independence and spirited personality, Hepburn's career as a Hollywood leading lady spanned more than 60 years. Her work came in a range of genres, from screwball comedy to literary drama, and she received four Academy Awards for Best Actress—a record for any performer. Hepburn's characters were often strong, sophisticated women with a hidden vulnerability.
  Raised in Connecticut by wealthy, progressive parents, Hepburn began to act while studying at Bryn Mawr College. After four years in the theatre, favorable reviews of her work on Broadway brought her to the attention of Hollywood. Her early years in the film industry were marked with success, including an Academy Award for her third picture, Morning Glory (1933), but this was followed by a series of commercial failures. In 1938 she was labeled "box office poison". Hepburn masterminded her own comeback, buying out her contract with RKO Radio Pictures and acquiring the film rights to The Philadelphia Story, which she sold on the condition that she be the star. In the 1940s she was contracted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where her career focused on an alliance with Spencer Tracy. The screen-partnership spanned 25 years, and produced nine movies.
  
  wn.com/Katharine_Hepburn
• Ken Thorne
  Kenneth Thorne (born 26 January 1925) is a British television and film score composer.
  Thorne was born in East Dereham, a town in the English county of Norfolk. Thorne began his musical career as a pianist with the big bands of England during the 1940s, playing at night clubs and the dance halls. At age 27, Thorne decided to seriously study composition with private tutors at Cambridge and later studied the organ for five years in London.
  Thorne began composing scores for films in 1948. Thorne was considered Richard Lester's composer of choice since their first work together on Help!.
  When Henry Mancini was scoring Blake Edwards' The Party with Peter Sellers, Thorne composed the soundtrack to Inspector Clouseau. He was hired for Richard Lester's films Superman II and III with instructions to reuse the music by John Williams and recompose them for the sequels, also adding some original work. He also did the music score for The Monkees movie Head. Since the 1980s, Ken Thorne has mainly focused his work for TV.
  
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  Kirk Douglas
  Kirk Douglas (born Issur Danielovitch, Russian: И́сер Даниело́вич; December 9, 1916) is an American stage and film actor, film producer and author. His popular films include Out of the Past (1947), Champion (1949), Ace in the Hole (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Lust for Life (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), Spartacus (1960), and Lonely Are the Brave (1962).
  He is No.17 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male American screen legends of all time, making him the highest-ranked living person on the list. In 1996, he received the Academy Honorary Award "for 50 years as a creative and moral force in the motion picture community."
  Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch in Amsterdam, New York, the son of Bryna "Bertha" (née Sanglel) and Herschel "Harry" Danielovitch, a businessman. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Gomel, Belarus. His father's brother, who emigrated earlier, used the surname Demsky, which Douglas's family adopted in the United States. In addition to their surname, his parents also changed their given names to Harry and Bertha. Douglas grew up as Izzy Demsky and legally changed his name to Kirk Douglas before entering the Navy during World War II.
  
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  Kurt Sanderling
  Kurt Sanderling CBE (19 September 1912 – 17 September 2011) was a German conductor. He worked in Germany and the Soviet Union.
  Kurt Sanderling was born in Arys, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire (now Orzysz, Poland) to Jewish parents. After early work at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, he left for the Soviet Union in 1936, where he worked with the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra. From 1942 to 1960, he was joint principal conductor with Yevgeny Mravinsky of the Leningrad Philharmonic. As a German refugee with a broad cultural outlook, he grew very close to Dmitri Shostakovich.
  Sanderling was a favorite of musicians world over. His easy going conducting manner proved he could get the finest results with orchestras of much lesser calibre. His Brahms and Sibelius cycles are held in highest critical acclaim. Listeners may note a warmth of approach more akin to old world conductors rather than the current "jet-set" style modern interpreters.
  He returned to East Germany where he led the Berlin Symphony Orchestra and Dresden Staatskapelle. He made his British debut in 1970. He later became particularly associated with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London starting in January 1980, with a series of performances of the complete Beethoven symphonies at Wembley. The Philharmonia later appointed Sanderling their Conductor Emeritus. He was also Emeritus Conductor of the Madrid Symphony Orchestra.
  
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  Lauren Bacall
  Lauren Bacall ( /ˌlɔrən bəˈkɔːl/; born Betty Joan Perske, September 16, 1924) is an American film and stage actress and model, known for her distinctive husky voice and sultry looks.
  She first emerged as leading lady in the Humphrey Bogart film To Have And Have Not (1944) and continued on in the film noir genre, with appearances in Bogart movies The Big Sleep (1946) and Dark Passage (1947), as well as a comedienne in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) with Marilyn Monroe and Designing Woman (1957) with Gregory Peck. Bacall has also worked on Broadway in musicals, gaining Tony Awards for Applause in 1970 and Woman of the Year in 1981. Her performance in the movie The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) earned her a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination.
  In 1999, Bacall was ranked #20 of the 25 actresses on the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Stars list by the American Film Institute. In 2009, she was selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to receive an Academy Honorary Award "in recognition of her central place in the Golden Age of motion pictures."
  
  wn.com/Lauren_Bacall
• Lawrence Foster
  Lawrence Foster (born October 23, 1941, in Los Angeles, California) is an American conductor of Romanian ancestry.
  Foster became the conductor of the San Francisco Ballet at the age of 18, and served as Assistant Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta. He has held music directorships with the Houston Symphony, the Orchestre National de Monte Carlo, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, and the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya in Spain. In late 1989, Foster had been reported as the next Music Director of the Pacific Symphony of Orange County, California. However, in February 1990, the offer was rescinded, and Foster never held this post.
  Since 2002, Foster has been the music director of the Gulbenkian Orchestra of Lisbon. He has served as music director of the Orchestre National de Montpellier and the Opéra National de Montpellier since September 2009. In February 2012, Foster was announced as the next music director of l'Opéra de Marseille and the Orchestre philharmonique de Marseille, beginning in September 2012, with an initial contract of 4 years.
  
  wn.com/Lawrence_Foster
• Lennie Hayton
  Leonard George "Lennie" Hayton (14 February 1908 – 24 April 1971) was an American Jewish composer, conductor and arranger. His trademark was the wearing of a captain’s hat, which he always wore at a rakish angle. He was initially a pianist in jazz groups led by Frankie Trumbauer, Bix Beiderbecke, Red Nichols, Joe Venuti and others. He also played with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. Hayton composed "Apple Blossoms" with Joe Venuti, Frankie Trumbauer, and Eddie Lang. His other compositions included "Flying Fingers", "The Stage is Set", "Mood Hollywood" with Jimmy Dorsey, and "Midnight Mood". Hayton also co-arranged the Hoagy Carmichael composition "Stardust" with Artie Shaw, for Shaw's recording of it in 1940, for Bluebird records.
  He became musical director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1940 and guided it through its prime years as forerunner of the movie musical. Up until his retirement from the post in 1953, he racked up four Academy Award nominations: for the Judy Garland musicals The Harvey Girls (1946) and The Pirate (1948). Hayton won the Academy Award for music for On the Town in 1950. Lennie Hayton also arranged the music for Singin' in the Rain in 1952. Hayton notched up two more nominations—one in 1968 for the unsuccessful Julie Andrews musical Star! and his last the following year for the Barbra Streisand vehicle Hello, Dolly!, which brought him his second and final Oscar. In 1970, Hayton arranged Frank Sinatra's first attempt at the George Harrison composition Something. However, Sinatra later began using a Nelson Riddle arrangement of the song in concert performances and in 1979 he put the Riddle version on record.^{[citation needed]}
  
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  Leonard Bernstein
  Leonard Bernstein ( /ˈbɜrnstaɪn/ US dict: bûrn′·stīn; August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim. According to The New York Times, he was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history."
  His fame derived from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, from his conducting of concerts with most of the world's leading orchestras, and from his music for West Side Story, as well as Candide, Wonderful Town, On the Town and his own Mass.
  Bernstein was also the first conductor to give numerous television lectures on classical music, starting in 1954 and continuing until his death. In addition, he was a skilled pianist, often conducting piano concertos from the keyboard.
  As a composer he wrote in many styles encompassing symphonic and orchestral music, ballet, film and theatre music, choral works, opera, chamber music and pieces for the piano. Many of his works are regularly performed around the world, although none has matched the tremendous popular and commercial success of West Side Story.
  
  wn.com/Leonard_Bernstein
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  Leonard Cohen
  Leonard Norman Cohen, CC GOQ (born 21 September 1934) is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet, and novelist. His work often explores religion, isolation, sexuality, and interpersonal relationships. Cohen has been inducted into the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and both the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. He is also a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour.
  While giving the speech at Cohen's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 10 March 2008, Lou Reed described Cohen as belonging to the "highest and most influential echelon of songwriters."
  Cohen was born on 21 September 1934 in Westmount, Montreal, Quebec, into a middle-class Jewish family. He attended Roslyn Elementary School. His mother, Marsha Klinitsky, of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry, emigrated from Lithuania while his great-grandfather emigrated from Poland. He grew up in Westmount on the Island of Montreal. His grandfather was Lyon Cohen, founding president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. His father, Nathan Cohen, who owned a substantial Montreal clothing store, died when Cohen was nine years old. On the topic of being a Kohen, Cohen has said that, "I had a very Messianic childhood." He told Richard Goldstein in 1967. "I was told I was a descendant of Aaron, the high priest." Cohen attended Westmount High School, beginning in 1948 where he was involved with the Student Council and studied music and poetry. He became especially interested in the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca. As a teenager, he learned to play the guitar, and formed a country-folk group called the Buckskin Boys. Although he initially played a regular acoustic guitar as a teenager, he soon switched to playing a classical guitar after meeting a young Spanish flamenco guitar player who taught him "a few chords and some flamenco."
  
  wn.com/Leonard_Cohen
• Leonard Rosenman
  Leonard Rosenman (September 7, 1924 – March 4, 2008) was an American film, television and concert composer.
  Leonard Rosenman was born in Brooklyn, New York. After service in the Pacific with the Army Air Forces in World War II, he earned a bachelor's degree in music from the University of California, Berkeley. He also studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg, Roger Sessions and Luigi Dallapiccola.
  Rosenman composed the scores for such films as East of Eden (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Fantastic Voyage (1966), The Lord of the Rings (1978), Cross Creek (1983) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). He wrote incidental music for such television series as The Defenders, The Twilight Zone, Gibbsville and Marcus Welby, M.D. He also wrote the theme and almost all of the incidental music used for the entire run of the 1960s World War II television series Combat!. In the 1970s he composed Bass Concerto Chamber Music 4 for bassist Buell Neidlinger and four string quartets with a second bass.
  
  wn.com/Leonard_Rosenman
• Leroy Vinnegar
  Leroy Vinnegar (July 13, 1928 – August 3, 1999) was an American jazz bassist.
  Born in Indianapolis, the self-taught Vinnegar established his reputation in Los Angeles during the 1950s and 1960s. His trademark was the rhythmic "walking" bass line, a steady series of ascending or descending notes, and it brought him the nickname "The Walker". Besides his jazz work, he also appeared on a number of soundtracks and pop albums, notably Van Morrison's 1972 album, Saint Dominic's Preview.
  He recorded extensively as both a leader and sideman. He came to public attention in the 1950s as a result of recording with Lee Konitz, André Previn, Stan Getz, Shorty Rogers, Chet Baker, Shelly Manne, Joe Castro and Serge Chaloff. He played bass on Previn and Manne's My Fair Lady album, one of the most successful jazz records ever produced. He also performed on another of jazz's biggest hit albums, Eddie Harris and Les McCann's Swiss Movement, released in 1969.
  He moved to Portland, Oregon in 1986. In 1995, the Oregon State Legislature honored him by proclaiming May 1 Leroy Vinnegar Day.
  
  wn.com/Leroy_Vinnegar
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  Lionel Hampton
  Lionel Leo Hampton (April 20, 1908 – August 31, 2002) was an American jazz vibraphonist, pianist, percussionist, bandleader and actor. Like Red Norvo, he was one of the first jazz vibraphone players. Hampton ranks among the great names in jazz history, having worked with a who's who of jazz musicians, from Benny Goodman and Buddy Rich to Charlie Parker and Quincy Jones. In 1992, he was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame.
  Lionel Hampton was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1908, and was raised by his grandmother. Shortly after he was born, he and his mother moved to her hometown Birmingham, Alabama. He spent his early childhood in Kenosha, Wisconsin before he and his family moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1916. As a youth, Hampton was a member of the Bud Billiken Club, an alternative to the Boy Scouts of America, which was off limits because of racial segregation. During the 1920s—while still a teenager—Hampton took xylophone lessons from Jimmy Bertrand and started playing drums. Hampton was raised Roman Catholic, and started out playing fife and drum at the Holy Rosary Academy near Chicago.
  
  wn.com/Lionel_Hampton
• Lionel Newman
  Lionel Newman (January 4, 1916 - February 3, 1989) was an American conductor, pianist, and film and television composer. He was the brother of Alfred Newman and Emil Newman, uncle of Randy Newman, David Newman and Thomas Newman, and grandfather of Joey Newman.
  Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Newman was one of ten children, the youngest of seven boys, born to Russian immigrant Jewish parents. While the family had little money, the children's mother, Luba, was a strong woman who encouraged them to achieve. Newman migrated to Hollywood where, at the age of 16, he began conducting for impresario Earl Carroll. This was where he met his future wife, Beverly Carroll, an Earl Carroll Vanity’s showgirl, and niece of the impresario. Newman had formal training in New York, and after moving to Los Angeles, he continued his studies with Joseph Achron and Mario Castelnuevo-Tedesco.
  In the 1930s, Newman earned his stripes conducting national tours and working as the piano accompanist for Mae West. She used to scold him for holding his hands too high in the pit saying, "I'm the show, Newman, not you."
  
  wn.com/Lionel_Newman
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  Lorin Maazel
  Lorin Varencove Maazel (born March 6, 1930) is an American conductor, violinist and composer.
  Maazel was born to Jewish-American parents of Russian origin in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France and brought up in the United States, primarily at his parents' home in Pittsburgh's Oakland neighborhood. His father, Lincoln Maazel (1903–2009), was a singer, teacher of voice and piano, and an actor (he co-starred in George A. Romero's 1977 horror movie Martin); and his mother, Marion "Marie" Shulman Maazel (1894–1992), founded the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra. His grandfather Isaac was a violinist in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra for twenty years. Both Lincoln and Marie gave interviews for the Oral History Collection at the University of Pittsburgh, Lincoln’s in 1994, and Marie’s in 1974. These can be heard online.
  Lorin Maazel was a child prodigy, taking his first conducting lesson at age seven with Vladimir Bakaleinikov and making his debut at age eight. At the age of eleven, he guest conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra on the radio. At twelve he toured America to conduct major orchestras. He made his violin debut at the age of fifteen. He later studied at the University of Pittsburgh.
  
  wn.com/Lorin_Maazel
• Malcolm Arnold
  Sir Malcolm Henry Arnold, CBE (21 October 1921 – 23 September 2006) was an English composer and symphonist.
  Malcolm Arnold began his career playing trumpet professionally, but by age thirty his life was devoted to composition. He was ranked with Benjamin Britten as one of the most sought-after composers in Britain. His natural melodic gift earned him a reputation as a composer of light music in works such as in some of his concert overtures and the sets of Welsh, English, Scottish, Irish and Cornish Dances. He was also a highly successful composer of film music, penning the scores to over a hundred features and documentaries, including classic titles such as The Bridge on the River Kwai, Hobson's Choice and the St Trinian's series. His nine symphonies are often deeply personal and show a more serious side to his work, which has proved more controversial. Arnold also wrote a variety of concertos and chamber works, as well as music for the theatre including major ballets. His brass music is widely acclaimed.
  
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  Manfred Honeck
  Manfred Honeck (born 17 September 1958) is an Austrian conductor, the son of Otto and Frieda Honeck, from a family of nine children. One of his brothers is the Vienna Philharmonic leader Rainer Honeck.
  As a youth, Honeck studied violin. He attended the Academy of Music in Vienna, and later played the viola. He was later a musician in the Vienna Philharmonic and the Vienna State Opera Orchestra. His early work as a conductor included a period as assistant to Claudio Abbado with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester (Youth Orchestra).
  From 1991 to 1996, Honeck conducted regularly at the Zurich Opera House. From 1997-1998, he was Music Director of the Norwegian National Opera in Oslo. He also held a regular position from 1996 to 1999 with the MDR Symphony Orchestra Leipzig. In 1998, he was named the Principal Guest Conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic. From 2000 to 2006, Honeck was Music Director of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, where his work included conducting the 2006 premiere of Sven-David Sandström's Ordet - en passion (24 March, Stockholm). Honeck became Generalmusikdirektor (GMD) of the Staatsoper Stuttgart with the 2007-2008 season, with an initial contract for four years. In November 2009, Stuttgart Opera announced the departure of Honeck as its GMD after the conclusion of his contract in 2011. Honeck formally concluded his Stuttgart tenure in the summer of 2011. Honeck became Principal Guest Conductor of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra with the 2008-2009 season.
  
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  Maria Tallchief
  Elizabeth Maria Tallchief (born January 24, 1925) was the first Native American to become prima ballerina. From 1942 to 1947 she danced with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, but she is even better known for her time with the New York City Ballet, from its founding in 1947 through 1965. Known professionally as Maria Tallchief, her family called her Betty Marie.
  She was born in Fairfax, Oklahoma to a father who was a chief in the Osage Nation and a Scots-Irish mother.
  Of her childhood she wrote, "I was a good student and fit in at Sacred Heart (Catholic school). But in many ways, I was a typical Indian girl — shy, docile, introverted. I loved being outdoors and spent most of my time wandering around my big front yard, where there was an old swing and a garden. I'd also ramble around the grounds of our summer cottage hunting for arrowheads in the grass. Finding one made me shiver with excitement. Mostly, I longed to be in the pasture, running around where the horses were...".
  She enjoyed music, dancing and ballet. Her desire to pursue a career in the arts was a challenging dream for a Native American child in those days. The family moved to Beverly Hills, California in 1933, where Maria studied ballet with Bronislava Nijinska for five years. Madame Nijinska's philosophy of discipline made sense to Tallchief. "When you sleep, sleep like a ballerina. Even on the street waiting for the bus, stand like ballerina".
  
  wn.com/Maria_Tallchief
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  Marilyn Horne
  Marilyn Horne (born January 16, 1934, Bradford, Pennsylvania) is an American mezzo-soprano opera singer. She specialized in roles requiring a large sound, beauty of tone, excellent breath support, and the ability to execute difficult coloratura passages.
  Horne was born in Bradford, Pennsylvania, but moved with her parents to Long Beach, California, when she was 11. At the age of 13, she became part of the newly formed Los Angeles Concert Youth Chorus. She attended the University of Southern California where she was a member of Pi Beta Phi sorority. She is an alumna of Long Beach Polytechnic High School and returned in 1989 in a performance to benefit its music program. As a high school student, Marilyn was part of the St. Luke's Choir of Long Beach under the direction of William Ripley Dorr. This prestigious choir often worked for the movie studios and recorded on Capitol Records. Marilyn and her sister Gloria were part of St. Luke's Quartet along with tenor, Bob James and baritone, Philip D. Haynes.
  
  wn.com/Marilyn_Horne
• Marion Williams
  Marion Williams (August 29, 1927 – July 2, 1994) was an American gospel singer.
  Marion Williams was born in Miami, Florida, to a religiously devout mother and musically inclined father. She left school when she was nine years old to help support the family, and worked as a maid, a nurse, and in factories and laundries. She began singing in front of auiences while young. As was common in the area, Williams learned African-American blues and jazz, alongside Caribbean calypso. Poverty caused Williams to leave school at fourteen, working with her mother at a laundry. She was singing at church and on street corners, inspired by a wide range of musicians, including Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Smith Jubilee Singers. She stuck with gospel in spite of pressure to switch to popular blues tunes or the opera.
  In 1946, while visiting a friend in Philadelphia, Williams happened to sing before an audience that included Clara and Gertrude Ward. They recognized her talent and offered her a job. A year later, she became part of the famous Ward Singers. Her growling, hands-on-the-hips vocal style made her the group's undisputed star.
  
  wn.com/Marion_Williams
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  Mariss Jansons
  Mariss Ivars Georgs Jansons (born 14 January 1943) is a Latvian conductor, the son of conductor Arvīds Jansons.
  His mother, the singer Iraida Jansons, who was Jewish, gave birth to him in hiding in Riga, Latvia, after her father and brother were killed in the Riga Ghetto. As a child, he first studied violin with his father.
  In 1946, his father won second prize in a national competition and was chosen by Yevgeny Mravinsky to be his assistant at the Leningrad Philharmonic. When his family joined him in 1956, young Jansons entered the Leningrad Conservatory, where he studied piano and conducting, although his father urged him to continue playing violin. In 1969 he continued his training in Vienna with Hans Swarowsky and in Salzburg with Herbert von Karajan. Karajan had invited Jansons to be his assistant with the Berlin Philharmonic, but the Soviet authorities blocked Jansons from ever hearing about the offer.
  In 1973, Jansons was appointed Associate Conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra (now Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra). In 1979, he was appointed music director of the Oslo Philharmonic, with which he performed, recorded and toured extensively. Jansons resigned his Oslo position in 2000 after disputes with the city over the acoustics of the Oslo Concert Hall.
  
  wn.com/Mariss_Jansons
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  Marvin Hamlisch
  Marvin Frederick Hamlisch (born June 2, 1944) is an American composer. He is one of only eleven people to have been awarded Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, and a Tony. He is also one of only two people to have won those four prizes and also a Pulitzer Prize (the other is Richard Rodgers). Hamlisch has also won two Golden Globes.
  Hamlisch was born in New York City to Viennese Jewish parents: Lilly Schachter and Max Hamlisch. His father was an accordionist and bandleader. Hamlisch was a child prodigy, and by age five he began mimicking music he heard on the radio on the piano. A few months before he turned seven, in 1951, he was accepted into what is now the Juilliard School Pre-College Division. His first job was as a rehearsal pianist for Funny Girl with Barbra Streisand. Shortly after that, he was hired by producer Sam Spiegel to play piano at Spiegel's parties. This connection led to his first film score, The Swimmer. His favorite musicals growing up were My Fair Lady, Gypsy, West Side Story, and Bye Bye Birdie.
  
  wn.com/Marvin_Hamlisch
• Maurice Jarre
  Maurice-Alexis Jarre (13 September 1924 – 28 March 2009) was a French composer and conductor. His son is the electronic composer Jean Michel Jarre.
  Although he composed several concert works, Jarre is best known for his film scores, particularly for his collaborations with film director David Lean. Jarre composed the scores to all of Lean's films since Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Other notable scores include The Train (1964), Mohammad, Messenger of God (1976), Witness (1985) and Ghost (1990).
  Jarre was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Three of his compositions spent a total of 42 weeks on the UK singles chart chart; the biggest hit was "Somewhere My Love" (to his tune "Lara's Theme", with lyrics by Paul Francis Webster) by the Michael Sammes Singers, which reached Number 14 in 1966 and spent 38 weeks on the chart.
  Jarre was a three time Academy Award winner, for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and A Passage to India (1984), all of which were directed by David Lean. He was Oscar nominated a total of eight times.
  
  wn.com/Maurice_Jarre
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  Max Steiner
  Max Steiner (May 10, 1888 – December 28, 1971) was an Austrian composer of music for theatre productions and films. He later became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Trained by the great classical music composers Brahms and Mahler, he was one of the first composers who primarily wrote music for motion pictures, and as such is often referred to as "the father of film music". Along with such composers as Franz Waxman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman and Miklós Rózsa, Steiner played a major part in creating the tradition of writing music for films.
  Steiner composed hundreds of film scores, including The Informer (1935), Now, Voyager (1942), and Since You Went Away (1944), which won him Academy Awards. He was nominated for the Academy Award a total of twenty-four times. He was also the first recipient of the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score, which he won for his score to Life with Father.
  Steiner was one of the best-known composers in Hollywood, and is widely regarded today as one of the greatest film score composers in the history of cinema. He was a frequent collaborator with some of the most famous film directors in history, including John Ford and William Wyler. Besides his Oscar-winning scores, some of Steiner's popular works include King Kong (1933), Little Women (1933), Jezebel (1938), Casablanca (1942), and the film score for which he is possibly best known, Gone with the Wind (1939). Despite being one of the most popular film soundtracks ever written, Gone with the Wind failed to win an Oscar for him.
  
  wn.com/Max_Steiner
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  Mia Farrow
  Mia Farrow (born February 9, 1945) is an American actress, singer, humanitarian, and fashion model.
  Farrow first gained wide acclaim for her role as Allison MacKenzie in the soap opera Peyton Place, and for her subsequent short-lived marriage to Frank Sinatra. An early film role, as the woman pregnant with Satan's baby in 1968's Rosemary's Baby, saw her portrayal nominated for many awards.
  Farrow has appeared in more than 45 films and won numerous awards, including a Golden Globe award (and seven additional Golden Globe nominations), three BAFTA Film Award nominations, and a win for best actress at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Farrow is also known for her extensive humanitarian work as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. She is involved in humanitarian activities in Darfur, Chad, and the Central African Republic. In 2008, Time magazine named her one of the most influential people in the world.
  Farrow was born as Maria de Lourdes Villiers Farrow in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Australian film director John Farrow and Irish actress Maureen O'Sullivan. She was raised Roman Catholic. Her sisters are Prudence and actors Stephanie and Tisa. She has three brothers: Michael Damien (1939–1958), Patrick Joseph (1942–2009) and John Charles (born 1946).^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Mia_Farrow
• Michael Gore
  Michael Gore (born March 5, 1951) is an American composer. He, along with lyricist Dean Pitchford, won the Oscar in 1980 for best original song for "Fame" from the film of the same title. He also won the award that year for best original score. Gore is the younger brother of singer/songwriter Lesley Gore.
  Gore wrote the music for the notorious Broadway flop Carrie - The Musical. Two of his songs, with lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, were featured in the 2003 movie Camp.
  He also composed the theme and score for the 1983 hit film Terms of Endearment starring Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger, notching a hit on the Adult Contemporary chart (and briefly the pop charts) under his own name with the "Theme" from this film.
  
  
  
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  Michel Legrand
  Michel Jean Legrand (born 24 February 1932, in Bécon-les-Bruyères in the Paris suburbs) is a French musical composer, arranger, conductor, and pianist. His father Raymond Legrand was a conductor and composer renowned for hits such as Irma la douce and his mother, Marcelle Der Mikaëlian (sister of conductor Jacques Hélian), who married Legrand Senior in 1929, was descended from the Armenian bourgeoisie.
  Legrand is a prolific composer, having written over 200 film and television scores in addition to many memorable songs. He is best known for his often haunting film music and scores, such as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) featuring the song "The Windmills of Your Mind" for which he won his first Academy Award.
  Legrand has composed more than two hundred film and television scores and several musicals and has made well over a hundred albums. He has won three Oscars (out of 13 nominations) and five Grammys and has been nominated for an Emmy. He was twenty-two when his first album, I Love Paris, became one of the best-selling instrumental albums ever released. He is a virtuoso jazz and classical pianist and an accomplished arranger and conductor who performs with orchestras all over the world.
  
  wn.com/Michel_Legrand
• Miltiades Caridis
  Miltiades Caridis (Greek: Μιλτιάδης Καρύδης; 9 May 1923– 1 March 1998) was a German-Greek conductor.
  Caridis was born in Gdańsk, then Free City of Danzig. His mother was a Danziger of German ethnicity, his father was a merchant from Greece. His family moved to Weimar Germany and he was raised in Dresden, but his family moved to Greece in 1938, sensing that war was imminent. According to the biography [1] Caridis was thus the only member of his Dresden school class to survive World War II. After the war, he studied with Hans Swarowsky in Vienna. His career has spanned opera in Cologne, Graz and Vienna. He has also conducted the Philharmonia Hungarica, the Oslo Philharmonic and the Tonkünstlerorchester. He was awarded the Béla Bartók medal in 1981 for his contribution in fomenting the appeal of the composer's work.
  He died in Athens from a stroke he sustained while he was rehearsing with the Ellinikí Radiofonía Tileórasi Greek National Orchestra.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Miltiades_Caridis
• Morris Stoloff
  Morris Stoloff (1 August 1898, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – 16 April 1980, Los Angeles, California) was a musical composer.
  Stoloff worked as a music director at Columbia Pictures from 1936 to 1962. Among space age pop fans, he is best remembered for his 1956 Top 10 hit that paired the swing era tune "Moonglow" with the love theme from the movie Picnic.
  A child prodigy on the violin, Stoloff was taken under the wing of W. A. Clark. After studying with Leopold Auer for several years, Stoloff was touring the U.S. as a featured soloist at the age of 16, and joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic a year later as its youngest member ever.
  When sound came to motion pictures, studios came looking for musicians to provide it, and Stoloff was one of the first to cross over from classical music to movies. He was the first concertmaster on Paramount Pictures' payroll, and he worked with setting up the mechanics of a system that had to provide a steady stream of music for everything from epic dramas to serials and comedy shorts.
  
  wn.com/Morris_Stoloff
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  Morton Gould
  Morton Gould (December 10, 1913 – February 21, 1996) was an American composer, conductor, arranger, and pianist.
  Born in Richmond Hill, New York, Gould was recognized early as a child prodigy with abilities in improvisation and composition. His first composition was published at age six. Gould studied at the Institute of Musical Art, although his most important teachers were Abby Whiteside and Vincent Jones.
  During the Depression, Gould, while a teenager, worked in New York City playing piano in movie theaters, as well as with vaudeville acts. When Radio City Music Hall opened, Gould was hired as the staff pianist. By 1935, he was conducting and arranging orchestral programs for New York's WOR radio station, where he reached a national audience via the Mutual Broadcasting System, combining popular programming with classical music.
  In the 1940s, Gould appeared on the Cresta Blanca Carnival program as well as The Chrysler Hour on CBS where he reached an audience of millions.
  Gould composed Broadway scores such as Billion Dollar Baby and Arms and the Girl; film music such as Delightfully Dangerous, Cinerama Holiday, and Windjammer; music for television series such as World War One; and ballet scores including Interplay, Fall River Legend, and I'm Old Fashioned.
  
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  Mozart
  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (German: [ˈvɔlfɡaŋ amaˈdeus ˈmoːtsaʁt], English see fn.), baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791), was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers.
  Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood in Salzburg. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. At 17, he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg, but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position, always composing abundantly. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of his death. The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized. He was survived by his wife Constanze and two sons.
  
  wn.com/Mozart
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  Neil Simon
  Neil Simon (born July 4, 1927) is an American playwright and screenwriter. He has written numerous Broadway plays, including Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and The Odd Couple. He won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Lost In Yonkers. He has written the screenplays for several of his plays that were made into movies. He also has written the books for several musicals, including Sweet Charity.
  Neil Simon was born on July 4, 1927 in The Bronx, New York City to Irving Simon, a garment salesman, and his wife Mamie. He was their second son and grew up in Washington Heights, Manhattan during the Great Depression. His father often abandoned the family, causing financial and emotional difficulties. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School and graduated at the age of sixteen.
  He attended New York Universitybriefly from 1944 to 1945, where he was enlisted in the Army Air Force Reserve training program. He was assigned to Lowry Air Force Base during 1945 and attended the University of Denver from 1945 to 1946. He was a sports editor for the military magazine Rev-Meter.
  
  wn.com/Neil_Simon
• Nelson Riddle
  Nelson Smock Riddle, Jr. (June 1, 1921 – October 6, 1985) was an American arranger, composer, bandleader and orchestrator whose career stretched from the late 1940s to the mid 1980s. His work for Capitol Records kept such vocalists as Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, Judy Garland, Peggy Lee, Johnny Mathis, Rosemary Clooney and Keely Smith household names. He found commercial and critical success again in the 1980s with a trio of Platinum albums with vocalist Linda Ronstadt.
  Riddle was born in Oradell, New Jersey, the only child of Marie Albertine Riddle and Nelson Smock Riddle, Sr., and later moved to nearby Ridgewood. Following his father's interest in music, he began taking piano lessons at age eight and trombone lessons at age fourteen. Riddle and his family had a summer house in Rumson, New Jersey. He enjoyed Rumson so much that he convinced his parents to allow him to attend high school there for his senior year. After his graduation from Rumson High School, Riddle spent his late teens and early 20s playing trombone in and occasionally arranging for various local dance bands, culminating in his association with the Charlie Spivak Orchestra.
  
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  Nino Rota
  Nino Rota (December 3, 1911, Milan – April 10, 1979, Rome) was an Italian composer and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. He also composed the music for two of Franco Zeffirelli's Shakespeare films, and for the first two films of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy, receiving for the latter the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1974.
  During his long career Rota was an extraordinarily prolific composer, especially of music for the cinema. He wrote more than 150 scores for Italian and international productions from the 1930s until his death in 1979—an average of three scores each year over a 46 year period, and in his most productive period from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s he wrote as many as ten scores every year, and sometimes more, with a remarkable thirteen film scores to his credit in 1954. Alongside this great body of film work, he composed ten operas, five ballets and dozens of other orchestral, choral and chamber works, the best known being his string concerto. He also composed the music for many theatre productions by Visconti, Zeffirelli and Eduardo de Filippo as well as maintaining a long teaching career at the Liceo Musicale in Bari, Italy, where he was the director for almost 30 years.
  
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  Okko Kamu
  Okko Kamu (born 7 March 1946, Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish orchestral conductor.
  Kamu was born into a family of musicians. His father played double bass in the Helsinki Philharmonic. He began violin studies at age two and entered the Sibelius Academy at age six. He formed his own string quartet, the Suhonen, in 1964 where he played first violin. At age 20, he was appointed first solo violinist at the Finnish National Opera, and held this post until 1968. He then began to conduct, initially with the Finnish National Opera orchestra. Primarily self-taught, he became principal guest conductor of the Royal Swedish Opera in 1969, the same year as he won the first Herbert von Karajan Conducting Competition in Berlin. From 1971 to 1977, Kamu was principal conductor of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra.
  Outside of Finland, Kamu was principal conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic from 1975 to 1979. He has also held leadership positions with the Stockholm Sinfonietta. He has been chief guest conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Copenhagen Philharmonic, the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra, and the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra. He is currently principal guest conductor of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. Kamu was awarded the Order of the Lion of Finland medal in 1999 by then president of Finland Martti Ahtisaari.
  
  wn.com/Okko_Kamu
• Olav Kielland
  Olav Løchen Kielland (16 August 1901 in Trondheim – 5 August 1985 in Bø, Telemark) was a Norwegian composer and conductor.
  Olav Løchen Kielland was born the son of Gabriel Kielland (1871–1960) and Margit Løchen (1875–1951). He took his final exams at the Trondheim Cathedral School in 1919. He studied to become an architect like his father at the Norwegian Institute of Technology from 1919 until 1921. He then moved to Leipzig where he studied conducting, composition, piano and bassoon at the Music Conservatory. In 1929 he attended Felix Weingartner's masterclass for conductors in Basel, Switzerland.
  Kielland had his debut as a conductor and pianist in Trondheim in 1923. He was repetiteur with the Casino Theatre in Oslo, and conductor with the Stora Teatern in Gothenburg. In 1931, he became the conductor for the Filharmonisk Selskap, now the Oslo Philharmonic), and served as artistic director from 1933 until 1945. In 1939, Kielland was offered the position as chief conductor by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, but was hindered by the outbreak of World War II and could not travel and accept the position.
  
  wn.com/Olav_Kielland
• Oliver Wallace
  Oliver George Wallace (August 6, 1887 – September 15, 1963) was a British composer and conductor. He was especially known for his film music compositions, which were written for many animation, documentary, and feature films from Walt Disney Studios.
  Wallace was born on August 6, 1887, in London. After completing his musical training, he went to the United States, where he initially worked primarily on the West Coast as a conductor of theater orchestras and as an organist accompanying silent films. At the same time, he also made a name as a songwriter, writing tunes such as the popular "Hindustan". With the advent of the talking film era, he worked increasingly for Hollywood film studios in the 1930s.
  In 1936 he joined Disney Studios, and quickly became one of the most important composers in the studio for short animated films. Wallace provided the music for more than 100 of these shorts. One of his best-known pieces is the song "Der Fuehrer's Face" from the 1942 Donald Duck propaganda cartoon. This parody of a Horst Wessel song was, mainly through the version by Spike Jones and His City Slickers, one of the biggest hits during the Second World War. Other shorts Wallace scored include "Ben and Me" (1953), about Benjamin Franklin and a mouse, and the Oscar-winning "Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom" (1953), the first cartoon to use the new Cinemascope process. In 1949 Wallace composed the music and voiced the villainous Mr. Winkie in the Disney film "The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad".
  
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  Oscar Peterson
  Oscar Emmanuel Peterson CC CQ OOnt (August 15, 1925 – December 23, 2007) was a Canadian jazz pianist and composer. He was called the "Maharaja of the keyboard" by Duke Ellington, "O.P." by his friends. He released over 200 recordings, won eight Grammy Awards, and received other numerous awards and honours over the course of his career. He is considered to have been one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time, having played thousands of live concerts to audiences worldwide in a career lasting more than 60 years.
  Peterson was born to immigrants from the West Indies; his father worked as a porter for Canadian Pacific Railway. Peterson grew up in the neighbourhood of Little Burgundy in Montreal, Quebec. It was in this predominantly black neighbourhood that he found himself surrounded by the jazz culture that flourished in the early 20th century. At the age of five, Peterson began honing his skills with the trumpet and piano. However, a bout of tuberculosis at age seven prevented him from playing the trumpet again, and so he directed all his attention to the piano. His father, Daniel Peterson, an amateur trumpeter and pianist, was one of his first music teachers, and his sister Daisy taught young Oscar classical piano. Young Oscar was persistent at practising scales and classical etudes daily, and thanks to such arduous practice he developed his astonishing virtuosity.
  
  wn.com/Oscar_Peterson
• Paul Bergé
  Paul Bergé (October 20, 1881 – May 1970) was the music director of the Houston Symphony from 1916 to 1918. The orchestra was dissolved in his last year due to World War I, and would not resume until 1931.
  
  
  
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  Paul Newman
  Paul Leonard Newman (January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008) was an American actor, film director, entrepreneur, humanitarian, professional racing driver, auto racing team owner, and auto racing enthusiast. He won numerous awards, including an Academy Award for best actor for his performance in the 1986 Martin Scorsese film The Color of Money and eight other nominations, three Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Cannes Film Festival Award, an Emmy award, and many honorary awards. He also won several national championships as a driver in Sports Car Club of America road racing, and his race teams won several championships in open wheel IndyCar racing.
  Newman was a co-founder of Newman's Own, a food company from which Newman donated all post-tax profits and royalties to charity. As of July 2011, these donations exceeded $300 million.
  Newman was born in Shaker Heights (a suburb of Cleveland). He was the son of Theresa (née Fetzer or Fetsko; Slovak: Terézia Fecková) and Arthur Sigmund Newman, who ran a profitable sporting goods store. His father was Jewish (Paul's paternal grandparents, Simon Newman and Hannah Cohn, were immigrants from Hungary and Poland). His mother, who practiced Christian Science, was born to a Slovak Roman Catholic family at Humenné, Ptičie (formerly Pticsie) in the former Kingdom of Hungary, Austria–Hungary (now Humenné in Slovakia). Newman had no religion as an adult, but described himself as a Jew, stating that "it's more of a challenge". Newman's mother worked in his father's store, while raising Paul and his brother, Arthur, who later became a producer and production manager.
  
  wn.com/Paul_Newman
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  Pete Seeger
  Peter "Pete" Seeger (born May 3, 1919) is an American folk singer and an iconic figure in the mid-20th-century American folk music revival. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene", which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. Members of The Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. In the 1960s, he re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, and environmental causes.
  As a song writer, he is best known as the author or co-author of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)", (composed with Lee Hays of The Weavers), and "Turn, Turn, Turn!", which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement and are still sung throughout the world. "Flowers" was a hit recording for The Kingston Trio (1962); Marlene Dietrich, who recorded it in English, German and French (1962); and Johnny Rivers (1965). "If I Had a Hammer" was a hit for Peter, Paul & Mary (1962) and Trini Lopez (1963), while The Byrds popularized "Turn, Turn, Turn!" in the mid-1960s, as did Judy Collins in 1964, and The Seekers in 1966. Seeger was one of the folksingers most responsible for popularizing the spiritual "We Shall Overcome" (also recorded by Joan Baez and many other singer-activists) that became the acknowledged anthem of the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement, soon after folk singer and activist Guy Carawan introduced it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. In the PBS "American Masters" episode Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, Seeger states it was he who changed the lyric from the traditional "We will overcome" to the more singable "We shall overcome".
  
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  Pierre Boulez
  Pierre Boulez (French pronunciation: [pjɛʁ bu.lɛːz]) (born 26 March 1925) is a French composer of contemporary classical music, a pianist, and a conductor.
  Boulez was born in Montbrison, Loire, France. As a child he began piano lessons and demonstrated aptitude in both music and mathematics. He pursued the latter at Lyon before pursuing music at the Paris Conservatoire under Olivier Messiaen and the wife of Arthur Honegger, Andrée Vaurabourg.
  Through Messiaen, Boulez discovered twelve-tone technique — which he would later study privately with René Leibowitz — and went on to write atonal music in a post-Webernian serial style. Boulez was initially part of a cadre of early supporters of Leibowitz, but due to an altercation with Leibowitz, their relations turned divisive, as Boulez spent much of his career promoting the music of Messiaen instead.
  The first fruits of this were his cantatas Le visage nuptial and Le soleil des eaux for female voices and orchestra, both composed in the late 1940s and revised several times since, as well as the Second Piano Sonata of 1948, a well-received 32-minute work that Boulez composed at the age of 23. Thereafter, Boulez was influenced by Messiaen's research to extend twelve-tone technique beyond the realm of pitch organization, serialising durations, dynamics, mode of attack, and so on. This technique became known as integral serialism.
  
  wn.com/Pierre_Boulez
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  R. Murray Schafer
  Raymond Murray Schafer (born 18 July 1933) is a Canadian composer, writer, music educator and environmentalist perhaps best known for his World Soundscape Project, concern for acoustic ecology, and his book The Tuning of the World (1977). He was notably the first recipient of the Jules Léger Prize in 1978.
  Born in Sarnia, Ontario, he studied at the Royal Schools of Music in London, the Royal Conservatory of Music, and the University of Toronto. At the latter institution he was a pupil of Richard Johnston.
  His music education theories are followed around the world. He started soundscape studies at Simon Fraser University in the 1960s.
  In addition to introducing the concept of soundscape, he also coined the term schizophonia in 1969, the splitting of a sound from its source or the condition caused by this split: "We have split the sound from the maker of the sound. Sounds have been torn from their natural sockets and given an amplified and independent existence. Vocal sound, for instance, is no longer tied to a hole in the head but is free to issue from anywhere in the landscape."Steven Feld, borrowing a term from Gregory Bateson, calls the recombination and recontextualization of sounds split from their sources schismogenesis.
  
  wn.com/R._Murray_Schafer
• 
  Rachmaninoff
  Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff (Russian: Серге́й Васи́льевич Рахма́нинов) (Russian pronunciation: [sʲɪrˈɡʲej rɐxˈmanʲɪnəf]; 1 April [O.S. 20 March] 1873 – 28 March 1943) was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music. Early influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and other Russian composers gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom that included a pronounced lyricism, expressive breadth, structural ingenuity, and a tonal palette of rich, distinctive orchestral colors. The piano is featured prominently in Rachmaninoff's compositional output. He made a point of using his own skills as a performer to explore fully the expressive possibilities of the instrument. Even in his earliest works he revealed a sure grasp of idiomatic piano writing and a striking gift for melody.
  Rachmaninoff was born on 1 April [O.S. 20 March] 1873 in Semyonovo, near Great Novgorod, in north-western Russia into a family of the Russian aristocracy, originally of partly Tatar descent, which had been in the service of the Russian tsars since the 16th century. His parents were both amateur pianists. When he was four, his mother gave him casual piano lessons, but it was his paternal grandfather, Arkady Alexandrovich Rachmaninoff, who brought Anna Ornatskaya, a teacher from Saint Petersburg, to teach the 9 year old Sergei in 1882. Ornatskaya remained for two or three years, until the family's house in Semyonovo had to be sold to settle debts and the Rachmaninoffs moved to Saint Petersburg.
  
  wn.com/Rachmaninoff
• 
  Ralph Burns
  Ralph Burns (June 29, 1922 – November 21, 2001) was an American songwriter, bandleader, composer, conductor, arranger and bebop pianist.
  Burns was born in Newton, Massachusetts where he began playing the piano as a child. In 1938, he attended the New England Conservatory of Music. He admitted that he learned the most about jazz by transcribing the works of Count Basie, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. While a student, Burns lived in Frances Wayne’s home. Wayne was already a well-known big band singer and her brother Nick Jerret was a bandleader who began working with Burns. He found himself in the company of such famous performers as Nat King Cole and Art Tatum.
  After Burns moved to New York in the early 1940s, he met Charlie Barnet and the two began working together. In 1944, he joined the Woody Herman band with members Neal Hefti, Bill Harris, Flip Phillips, Chubby Jackson and Dave Tough. Together, the group developed a powerful and distinctive sound. For 15 years, Burns wrote or arranged many of the band's major hits including "Bijou", "Northwest Passage" and "Apple Honey", and on the longer work "Lady McGowan’s Dream" and the three-part Summer Sequence.
  
  wn.com/Ralph_Burns
• Ray Heindorf
  Ray Heindorf (August 25, 1908 - February 3, 1980) was an American songwriter, composer, conductor, and arranger.
  Born in Haverstraw, New York, Heindorf worked as a pianist in a movie house in Mechanicville in his early teens. In 1928, he moved to New York City, where he worked as a musical arranger before heading to Hollywood. He gained his first job as an orchestrator at MGM, where he worked on Hollywood Revue of 1929, and subsequently went on the road playing piano for Lupe Vélez.
  After completing this engagement, he joined Warner Bros., composing and/or arranging and conducting music exclusively for the studio for nearly forty years. Heindorf, along with Georgie Stoll at MGM, were jazz aficionados well known in the black entertainment community for employing minority musicians in their studio music departments.
  He undertook the musical direction of Judy Garland's 1954 comeback film A Star is Born and made a cameo appearance as himself in the premiere party sequence where Jack Carson's character congratulates him on a great score.
  
  wn.com/Ray_Heindorf
• Raymond Rasch
  Ray Rasch (March 1, 1917 in Toledo, Ohio – December 23, 1964) was a pianist and arranger on the Hollywood scene in 1950s and 1960s. Rasch won a posthumous Academy Award in 1972 for "Best Original Music Score" for Chaplin's 1952 film Limelight (along with Charles Chaplin and Larry Russell).
  
  wn.com/Raymond_Rasch
• 
  Richard M. Sherman
  Richard Morton Sherman (born June 12, 1928) is an American songwriter who specialized in musical film with his brother Roger Bernard Sherman.
  Some of the Sherman Brothers' best-known writing includes the songs from Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book, Winnie the Pooh, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Slipper and the Rose, and the Disney theme park song It's a Small World (After All).
  Richard Morton Sherman was born in New York City to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Rosa & Al Sherman. Together with his older brother Roger, "The Sherman Brothers" eventually followed in their songwriting father's footsteps to form a long-lasting songwriting partnership.
  Following seven years of frequent cross-country moves, the Sherman family finally settled down in Beverly Hills, California in 1937. Throughout Richard's years at Beverly Hills High School he became fascinated with music and studied several instruments including the flute, clarinet, piccolo and piano.
  At his 1946 graduation from Beverly Hills High School, Richard Sherman and André Previn played a musical duet. Previn played piano and Sherman played flute. Coincidentally, in 1965 both composers won Oscars in music categories for different films.
  
  wn.com/Richard_M._Sherman
• Risë Stevens
  Risë Stevens ( /ˈriːsə/; born June 11, 1913, New York City) is a retired American operatic mezzo-soprano.
  Born Risë Steenberg to Christian and Sarah (née Mechanic) Steenberg, known as "Sadie". Her father was of Norwegian Lutheran descent and her mother was Jewish, of Polish and Russian descent. She had a younger brother, Lewis "Bud" Steenberg. She studied at New York's Juilliard School for three years. She went to Vienna, where she was trained by Marie Gutheil-Schoder and Herbert Graf. She made her début as Mignon in Prague in 1936 and stayed there until 1938, also appearing in guest appearances at the Vienna State Opera.
  She was engaged at the Teatro Colón in 1938 (as Octavian) and was invited to the Glyndebourne Festival in 1939 where she was heard as Dorabella and Cherubino. In 1938 she made her début at the Metropolitan Opera as Mignon. Three days later, she sang Octavian opposite Lotte Lehmann. The film industry in Hollywood produced several films for her, including The Chocolate Soldier (1941) with Nelson Eddy and Going My Way (1944) with Bing Crosby, the latter film crediting Stevens as a contralto.
  
  wn.com/Risë_Stevens
• 
  Robert B. Sherman
  Robert Bernard Sherman (December 19, 1925 – March 5, 2012) was an American songwriter who specialized in musical films with his brother Richard Morton Sherman. Some of the Sherman Brothers' best known songs were incorporated into movies and animations like Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Slipper and the Rose, Charlotte's Web and the theme park song of "It's a Small World (After All)".
  Robert Bernard Sherman was born on December 19, 1925 in New York City to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Rosa and Al Sherman. Al Sherman, a songwriter, paid for Robert's hospital delivery costs with a royalty check that had arrived that day for the song "Save Your Sorrow". Al Sherman was to become a well known Tin Pan Alley songwriter.
  As a youth, Robert Sherman excelled in intellectual pursuits, taking up the violin and piano, painting and writing poetry. Following seven years of frequent cross-country moves, the Shermans finally settled down in Beverly Hills, California. Some of the primary schools Robert attended in Manhattan included PS 241 and the Ethical Culture Fieldston School; in California, the El Rodeo School.
  
  wn.com/Robert_B._Sherman
• Roger Edens
  Roger Edens (9 November 1905 - 13 July 1970) was a Hollywood composer, arranger and associate producer, and is considered one of the major creative figures in Arthur Freed's musical film production unit at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the "golden era of Hollywood".
  Edens was born in Hillsboro, Texas. His parents were of Scots-Irish ancestry. He worked as a piano accompanist for ballroom dancers before going to work as a musical conductor on Broadway. He went to Hollywood in 1932 along with his protege Ethel Merman, writing and arranging her material for her films at Paramount. In 1935, he joined MGM as a musical supervisor and occasional composer and arranger, notably of music for Judy Garland. He also appeared on screen opposite Eleanor Powell in a cameo in Broadway Melody of 1936.
  Arthur Freed, producer of musicals at MGM, was impressed by Edens and soon made him integral to his production team, which was rapidly growing and featured many of the greatest talents, recruited by Freed himself. Freed built a cabinet around himself, and in the early 1940s made Edens associate producer. The unit made dozens of popular and extremely successful musical films in the 1940s and into the 1950s, including Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Easter Parade (1948), On the Town (1949), Show Boat (1951), An American in Paris (1951), Singin' in the Rain (1952), and The Band Wagon (1953).
  
  wn.com/Roger_Edens
• Ronald Harwood
  Sir Ronald Harwood CBE (born 9 November 1934) is an author, playwright and screenwriter. He is most noted for his plays for the British stage as well as the screenplays for The Dresser (for which he was nominated for an Oscar) and The Pianist, for which he won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He was nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007).
  Harwood was born Ronald Horwitz in Cape Town, South Africa, the son of Isobel (née Pepper) and Isaac Horwitz. Harwood moved from Cape Town to London in 1951 to pursue a career in the theatre. He changed his name from Horwitz after an English master told him it was too foreign and too Jewish for a stage actor. After training for the stage at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he joined the Shakespeare Company of Sir Donald Wolfit. From 1953 to 1958, Harwood was Sir Donald's personal dresser. He would later draw on this experience when he wrote the stage play, The Dresser, and the biography, Sir Donald Wolfit CBE: His life and work in the Unfashionable Theatre. In 1959, after leaving the Wolfit company. he joined the 59 Theatre Company for a season at the Lyric Hammersmith.
  
  wn.com/Ronald_Harwood
• 
  Roy Acuff
  Roy Claxton Acuff (September 15, 1903 – November 23, 1992) was an American country music singer, fiddler, and promoter. Known as the "King of Country Music," Acuff is often credited with moving the genre from its early string band and "hoedown" format to the star singer-based format that helped make it internationally successful.
  Acuff began his music career in the 1930s, and gained regional fame as the singer and fiddler for his group, the Smoky Mountain Boys. He joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1938, and although his popularity as a musician waned in the late 1940s, he remained one of the Opry's key figures and promoters for nearly four decades. In 1942, Acuff co-founded the first major Nashville-based country music publishing company—Acuff-Rose Music—which signed acts such as Hank Williams, Roy Orbison, and The Everly Brothers. In 1962, Acuff became the first living inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
  Roy Acuff was born in Maynardville, Tennessee to Ida (née Carr) and Simon E. Neill Acuff, the third of five children. The Acuffs were a fairly prominent Union County family. Roy's paternal grandfather, Coram Acuff, had been a Tennessee state senator, and Roy's maternal grandfather was a local physician. Roy's father was an accomplished fiddler and a Baptist preacher, his mother was proficient on the piano, and during Roy's early years the Acuff house was a popular place for local gatherings. At such gatherings, Roy would often amuse people by balancing farm tools on his chin. He also learned to play harmonica and jaw harp at a young age.
  
  wn.com/Roy_Acuff
• Rudolf Kempe
  Rudolf Kempe (born 14 June 1910 in Dresden, died 12 May 1976 in Zürich) was a German conductor.
  Kempe was born in Dresden, where from the age of fourteen he studied at the Dresden State Opera School. He played oboe in the opera orchestra of Dortmund and then in the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra, from 1929. In addition to oboe, he played the piano regularly, as a soloist, in chamber music or accompanying, as a result of which, in 1933, the new Director of the Leipzig Opera invited Kempe to become a répétiteur, and later a conductor, for the opera.
  During the Second World War Kempe was conscripted into the army, but instead of active service was directed into musical activities, playing for the troops and later taking over the chief conductorship of the Chemnitz opera house.
  Kempe directed the Dresden Opera and the Dresden Staatskapelle from 1949 to 1952, making his first records, including Der Rosenkavalier, Die Meistersinger and Der Freischütz. ‘He obtains some superlative playing from the Dresden orchestra,’ commented The Record Guide. He maintained a relationship with the Dresden orchestra for the rest of his life, making some of his best-known records with them during the stereo era.
  
  wn.com/Rudolf_Kempe
• 
  Samuel Barber
  Samuel Osborne Barber II (March 9, 1910 – January 23, 1981) was an American composer of orchestral, opera, choral, and piano music. He is one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century; music critic Donal Henahan stated that "Probably no other American composer has ever enjoyed such early, such persistent and such long-lasting acclaim." His Adagio for Strings (1936) has earned a permanent place in the concert repertory of orchestras. He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music, for his opera Vanessa (1956–57) and his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1962). Also widely performed is his Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1947), a work for soprano and orchestra, which sets a prose text by James Agee. Unusual among contemporary composers, nearly all of his compositions have been recorded.
  Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, the son of Marguerite McLeod (née Beatty) and Samuel Le Roy Barber. He was born into a comfortable, educated, social, and distinguished Irish-American^{[citation needed]} family. His father was a physician, and his mother was a pianist. His aunt, Louise Homer, was a leading contralto at the Metropolitan Opera and his uncle, Sidney Homer, was a composer of American art songs. Louise Homer is known to have influenced Barber's interest in voice. Through his aunt, Barber had access to many great singers and songs.
  
  wn.com/Samuel_Barber
• Saul Chaplin
  Saul Chaplin (February 19, 1912 – November 15, 1997) was an American composer and musical director.
  He was born Saul Kaplan in Brooklyn, New York. He had worked on stage, screen and television since the days of Tin Pan Alley. In film, he won four Oscars for collaborating on the scores and orchestrations of An American in Paris (1951), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) and West Side Story (1961).
  Following education at New York University's School of Commerce, Chaplin joined the ASCAP and started out penning tunes for the theatre, vaudeville and for New York's famous songwriting district, Tin Pan Alley. While in New York, Chaplin teamed with Sammy Cahn to compose original songs for Vitaphone movie shorts, filmed in Brooklyn by Warner Brothers. During this period the team was sometimes billed only by surname ("Cahn and Chaplin"), in the manner of Rodgers and Hart or Gilbert and Sullivan.
  Cahn and Chaplin relocated to Hollywood and scored two films for Universal Pictures. Chaplin then moved to Columbia Pictures to score Cover Girl and The Jolson Story. While on the latter film, Chaplin and Al Jolson penned the million-selling hit tune The Anniversary Song. In the late 1940s, Chaplin moved to MGM to work on a long string of films including On the Town (1949), Kiss Me Kate (1953), High Society (1956) and Merry Andrew (1958). For collaborating on such hits as Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen and Please Be Kind, Chaplin was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1985.
  
  wn.com/Saul_Chaplin
• 
  Sean Connery
  Sir Thomas Sean Connery (born 25 August 1930) is a Scottish actor and producer who has won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards (one of them being a BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award) and three Golden Globes (including the Cecil B. DeMille Award and a Henrietta Award).
  Connery is best known for portraying the character James Bond, starring in seven Bond films between 1962 and 1983 (six Eon Productions films and the non-canonical Thunderball remake, Never Say Never Again). In 1988, Connery won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Untouchables. His film career also includes such films as Marnie, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Hunt for Red October, Highlander, Murder on the Orient Express, Dragonheart, and The Rock. He was knighted in July 2000. Connery has been polled as "The Greatest Living Scot" and "Scotland's Greatest Living National Treasure". In 1989, he was proclaimed "Sexiest Man Alive" by People magazine and in 1999, at age 69, he was voted "Sexiest Man of the Century".
  
  wn.com/Sean_Connery
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  Sergei Prokofiev
  Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev (Russian: Сергей Сергеевич Прокофьев; 23 April 1891 – 5 March 1953) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor who mastered numerous musical genres and is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. His best-known works include the March from The Love for Three Oranges, the suite Lieutenant Kijé, the ballet Romeo and Juliet – from which "Dance of the Knights" is taken – and Peter and the Wolf. Besides many other works, Prokofiev also composed five piano concertos, nine completed piano sonatas and seven symphonies.
  A graduate of the St Petersburg Conservatory, Prokofiev initially made his name as an iconoclastic composer-pianist, achieving notoriety with a series of ferociously dissonant and virtuosic works for his instrument and his first two piano concertos. Prokofiev's first major success breaking out of the composer-pianist mould was with his purely orchestral Scythian Suite, compiled from music originally composed for a ballet commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes; Diaghilev commissioned three further ballets from Prokofiev – Chout, Le pas d'acier and The Prodigal Son – which at the time of their original production were all highly successful. Prokofiev's greatest interest, however, was opera, and he composed several works in that genre, including The Gambler and The Fiery Angel. Prokofiev's one relative success in that genre during his lifetime was The Love for Three Oranges, composed for Chicago and subsequently performed over the following decade in Europe and Russia.
  
  wn.com/Sergei_Prokofiev
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  Sergei Rachmaninoff
  Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff (Russian: Серге́й Васи́льевич Рахма́нинов) (Russian pronunciation: [sʲɪrˈɡʲej rɐxˈmanʲɪnəf]; 1 April [O.S. 20 March] 1873 – 28 March 1943) was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music. Early influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and other Russian composers gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom that included a pronounced lyricism, expressive breadth, structural ingenuity, and a tonal palette of rich, distinctive orchestral colors. The piano is featured prominently in Rachmaninoff's compositional output. He made a point of using his own skills as a performer to explore fully the expressive possibilities of the instrument. Even in his earliest works he revealed a sure grasp of idiomatic piano writing and a striking gift for melody.
  Rachmaninoff was born on 1 April [O.S. 20 March] 1873 in Semyonovo, near Great Novgorod, in north-western Russia into a family of the Russian aristocracy, originally of partly Tatar descent, which had been in the service of the Russian tsars since the 16th century. His parents were both amateur pianists. When he was four, his mother gave him casual piano lessons, but it was his paternal grandfather, Arkady Alexandrovich Rachmaninoff, who brought Anna Ornatskaya, a teacher from Saint Petersburg, to teach the 9 year old Sergei in 1882. Ornatskaya remained for two or three years, until the family's house in Semyonovo had to be sold to settle debts and the Rachmaninoffs moved to Saint Petersburg.
  
  wn.com/Sergei_Rachmaninoff
• Sergiu Comissiona
  Sergiu Comissiona (June 16, 1928, Bucharest – March 5, 2005, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) was a Romanian conductor and violinist.
  Born in Bucharest, Romania, he began violin studies at the age of five, was hired as a violinist by the Romanian State Ensemble while still in his teens, making his conducting debut at the age of 17. In his twenties he was named principal conductor of the Romanian National Opera, which he led from 1955 to 1959.
  He fled the Communist regime in 1959 and emigrated to Israel. In 1960 he founded the Ramat Gan Chamber Orchestra, which he led until 1967. He also directed the Haifa Symphony from 1959 until 1966. He made his American debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1965 and emigrated to the United States in 1968. Later he was also music director of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Sweden, from 1966 to 1977, and became chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic in Hilversum, Netherlands, in 1982. Comissiona also held music directorships with some of North America's leading ensembles, including the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Houston Symphony, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and was also music director of the New York City Opera. Beginning in 1969 he spent 15 years with the Baltimore Orchestra and transformed it from a little-known ensemble into a nationally respected orchestra, eventually leading taking it on its first international tour and directing it in its first recordings. He was also the Music Director of the Asian Youth Orchestra. Comissiona was principal conductor of the Spanish national broadcasting network orchestra in Madrid, the RTVE Symphony Orchestra, from 1990 to 1998.
  
  wn.com/Sergiu_Comissiona
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  Shelly Manne
  Shelly Manne (June 11, 1920 – September 26, 1984), born Sheldon Manne in New York City, was an American jazz drummer. Most frequently associated with West Coast jazz, he was known for his versatility and also played in a number of other styles, including Dixieland, swing, bebop, avant-garde jazz and fusion, as well as contributing to the musical background of hundreds of Hollywood films and television programs.
  Manne's father and uncles were drummers. In his youth he admired many of the leading swing drummers of the day, especially Jo Jones and Dave Tough.Billy Gladstone, a colleague of Manne's father and the most admired percussionist on the New York theatrical scene, offered the teenage Shelly tips and encouragement. From that time, Manne rapidly developed his style in the clubs of 52nd Street in New York in the late 1930s and 1940s. His first professional job with a known big band was with the Bobby Byrne Orchestra in 1940. In those years, as he became known, he recorded with jazz stars like Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Shavers, and Don Byas. He also worked with a number of musicians mainly associated with Duke Ellington, like Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, Lawrence Brown, and Rex Stewart.
  
  wn.com/Shelly_Manne
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  Shirley Temple
  Shirley Jane Temple (born April 23, 1928), later Shirley Temple Black, is an American film and television actress, singer, dancer, autobiographer, and former U.S. Ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia. She began her film career in 1932 at the age of three, and in 1934, found international fame in Bright Eyes, a feature film designed specifically for her talents. She received a special Juvenile Academy Award in February 1935, and film hits such as Curly Top and Heidi followed year after year during the mid-to-late 1930s. Licensed merchandise that capitalized on her wholesome image included dolls, dishes, and clothing. Her box office popularity waned as she reached adolescence, and she left the film industry at the age of 12 to attend high school^{[clarification needed]}. She appeared in a few films of varying quality in her mid-to-late teens, and retired completely from films in 1950 at the age of 22. She was the top box-office draw four years in a row (1935–38) in a Motion Picture Herald poll.
  
  wn.com/Shirley_Temple
• 
  Shostakovich
  Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich Russian pronunciation: [ˈdmʲitrʲɪj ˈdmʲitrʲɪɪvʲɪt͡ɕ ʂəstɐˈkovʲɪt͡ɕ] (Russian: Дмитрий Дмитриевич Шостакович; 25 September 1906 – 9 August 1975) was a Soviet Russian composer and pianist and was one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century.
  Shostakovich achieved fame in the Soviet Union under the patronage of Leon Trotsky's chief of staff Mikhail Tukhachevsky, but later had a complex and difficult relationship with the government. Nevertheless, he received accolades and state awards and served in the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR (1947–1962) and the USSR (from 1962 until death).
  After a period influenced by Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky, Shostakovich developed a hybrid style, as exemplified by Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934). This single work juxtaposed a wide variety of trends, including the neo-classical style (showing the influence of Stravinsky) and post-Romanticism (after Gustav Mahler). Sharp contrasts and elements of the grotesque characterize much of his music.
  
  wn.com/Shostakovich
• Sid Ramin
  Sidney Norton Ramin (born January 22, 1919) is an American orchestrator, arranger, and composer.
  The son of Ezra Ramin, a window trimmer, and Beatrice D. (Salamoff) Ramin, he was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 22, with various sources indicating either a birth year of 1919 or 1924. Ramin married Gloria Breit, a singer and model, on January 9, 1949. They have one child, a son Ronald.
  Ramin has won several professional awards throughout his career. He is one of only a handful of artists who have won the Academy, Emmy, and Grammy Awards.
  Ramin has orchestrated many television, film, and theatrical productions, as indicated below. He was also responsible for composing the music and lyrics for "Smile, You're On Candid Camera" of the hidden camera television program Candid Camera in the 1960s. In his early years, he frequently collaborated with arranger Robert Ginzler, most notably on Gypsy.
  
  wn.com/Sid_Ramin
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  Sidney Poitier
  Sir Sidney Poitier, KBE ( /ˈpwɑːtjeɪ/ or /ˈpwɑːti.eɪ/; born February 20, 1927) is a Bahamian American actor, film director, author, and diplomat.
  In 1963, Poitier became the first black person to win an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Lilies of the Field. The significance of this achievement was later bolstered in 1967 when he starred in three well-received films To Sir, with Love; In the Heat of the Night; and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, making him the top box office star of that year. In all three films, issues revolve around the race of the characters Poitier portrays. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Poitier among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time, ranking 22nd on the list of 25.
  Poitier has directed a number of popular movies such as A Piece of the Action; Uptown Saturday Night, and Let's Do It Again (with friend Bill Cosby), and Stir Crazy (starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder). In 2002, 38 years after receiving the Best Actor Award, Poitier was chosen by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to receive an Honorary Award, designated "To Sidney Poitier in recognition of his remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human being." Since 1997 he has been the Bahamian ambassador to Japan. On August 12, 2009, Sidney Poitier was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States of America's highest civilian honor, by President Barack Obama.
  
  wn.com/Sidney_Poitier
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  Simon Rattle
  Sir Simon Denis Rattle, CBE (born 19 January 1955) is an English conductor. He rose to international prominence as conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and since 2002 has been principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic (BPO).
  Rattle was born in Liverpool, the son of Pauline Lila Violet (Greening) and Denis Guttridge Rattle, a Commander in the Royal Navy. He was educated at Liverpool College. Although Rattle studied piano and violin, his early work with orchestras was as a percussionist. He entered the Royal Academy of Music, University of London in 1971. There, his teachers included John Carewe. In 1974, his graduation year, Rattle won the John Player Conductor Competition. After organising and conducting a performance of Mahler's Second Symphony whilst still at the Academy, he was talent-spotted by the music agent Martin Campbell-White, of Harold Holt Ltd. (now Askonas Holt Ltd.), who has since managed Rattle's career. He spent the academic year 1980/81 at St Anne's College, Oxford studying English Language and Literature. He had been attracted to the college by the reputation of Dorothy Bednarowska, Fellow and Tutor in English. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of St Anne's in 1991. He was admitted to the degree of Doctor of Music honoris causa of the University of Oxford in 1999.
  
  wn.com/Simon_Rattle
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  Soon-Yi Previn
  Soon-Yi Previn (previously named Soon-Yi Farrow Previn) (born October 8, 1970) is the wife of film director Woody Allen. They have been together for 20 years.
  Born in South Korea, Soon-Yi was about eight years old when she was adopted by André Previn and his then-wife, Mia Farrow. Mia Farrow and Woody Allen became a couple in 1980.
  Previn gained international attention in 1992 when it was revealed that she was having a relationship with her own adoptive mother's long-time romantic partner, Woody Allen. The relationship began in late 1991 and became known to Farrow in January 1992.
  The affair was covered by tabloids, focusing not only on her familial relation to Allen's long-time partner, her own adoptive mother, and to their children, but also the 34-year age difference between Previn and Allen.
  Allen and Farrow's biological son, Ronan Farrow, said of Allen: "He's my father married to my sister. That makes me his son and his brother-in-law. That is such a moral transgression." Soon-Yi Previn said in 1992 that she does not, and never did, consider Woody Allen to be her father, stepfather, or father figure; she said she considers André Previn to be her adoptive father. She also commented that "I was never remotely close to Woody. He was someone who was devoted exclusively to his own children and to his work, and we never spent a moment together."
  
  wn.com/Soon-Yi_Previn
• Stephen Sondheim
  Stephen Joshua Sondheim ( /ˈsɒnd.haɪm/) (born March 22, 1930) is an American composer and lyricist known for his contributions to musical theatre. He is the winner of an Academy Award, eight Tony Awards (more than any other composer) including the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, multiple Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and the Laurence Olivier Award. Described by Frank Rich of the New York Times as "the greatest, and perhaps best-known artist working in musical theatre", his most famous works include (as composer/lyricist) A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods. He also wrote the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy.
  Sondheim has also written material for movies, including the 1981 Warren Beatty film Reds, contributing the song "Goodbye For Now". He also wrote five songs for the 1990 movie Dick Tracy, including "Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)", which won the Academy Award for Best Song.
  
  wn.com/Stephen_Sondheim
• 
  Stevie Wonder
  Stevland Hardaway Morris (born May 13, 1950 as Stevland Hardaway Judkins), known by his stage name Stevie Wonder, is an American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, a child prodigy who developed into one of the most creative musical figures of the late 20th century. Blind since shortly after birth, Wonder signed with Motown's Tamla label at the age of eleven, and continues to perform and record for Motown to this day.
  Among Wonder's best known works are singles such as "Superstition", "Sir Duke", "I Wish" and "I Just Called to Say I Love You". Well known albums also include Talking Book, Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life. He has recorded more than thirty U.S. top ten hits and received twenty-two Grammy Awards, the most ever awarded to a male solo artist. Wonder is also noted for his work as an activist for political causes, including his 1980 campaign to make Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a holiday in the United States. In 2009, Wonder was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace. In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of the Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists to celebrate the US singles chart's fiftieth anniversary, with Wonder at number five.
  
  wn.com/Stevie_Wonder
• 
  Thomas Beecham
  Sir Thomas Beecham, 2nd Baronet, CH (29 April 1879 – 8 March 1961) was an English conductor and impresario best known for his association with the London Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonic orchestras. He was also closely associated with the Liverpool Philharmonic and Hallé orchestras. From the early 20th century until his death, Beecham was a major influence on the musical life of Britain and, according to the BBC, was Britain's first international conductor.
  Born to a rich industrial family, Beecham began his career as a conductor in 1899. He used his access to the family fortune to finance opera from the 1910s until the start of the Second World War, staging seasons at Covent Garden, Drury Lane and His Majesty's Theatre with international stars, his own orchestra and a wide repertoire. Among the works he introduced to England were Richard Strauss's Elektra, Salome and Der Rosenkavalier and three operas by Frederick Delius.
  Together with his younger colleague Malcolm Sargent, Beecham founded the London Philharmonic, and he conducted its first performance at the Queen's Hall in 1932. In the 1940s, he worked for three years in the United States, where he was music director of the Seattle Symphony and conducted at the Metropolitan Opera. After his return to Britain, he founded the Royal Philharmonic in 1946 and conducted it until his death in 1961.
  
  wn.com/Thomas_Beecham
• 
  Tom Stoppard
  Sir Tom Stoppard, OM, CBE, FRSL (born Tomáš Straüssler; 3 July 1937) is a British playwright, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil and Shakespeare in Love and has won one Academy Award and four Tony Awards. Themes of human rights, censorship and political freedom pervade his work along with exploration of linguistics and philosophy. Stoppard has been a key playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation.
  In 1939, Stoppard left Czechoslovakia as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright. He has been married twice, to Josie Ingle (1965–1972) and Miriam Stoppard (1972–1992), and has two sons from each marriage, one of whom is actor Ed Stoppard.
  
  wn.com/Tom_Stoppard
• Toru Takemitsu
  Toru Takemitsu (武満 徹, Takemitsu Tōru^?, October 8, 1930 – February 20, 1996) was a Japanese composer and writer on aesthetics and music theory. Largely self-taught, Takemitsu possessed consummate skill in the subtle manipulation of instrumental and orchestral timbre. He drew from a wide range of influences, including jazz, popular music, avant-garde procedures and traditional Japanese music, in a harmonic idiom largely derived from the music of Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen.
  His 1957 Requiem for strings attracted international attention, led to several commissions from across the world and established his reputation as one of the leading 20th century Japanese composers. Takemitsu was the recipient of numerous awards, commissions and honours. He composed over 100 film scores and about 130 concert works for ensembles of various sizes and combinations. He also wrote a detective novel and appeared frequently on Japanese television as a celebrity chef.
  In the foreword to a selection of Takemitsu's writings in English, conductor Seiji Ozawa writes: "I am very proud of my friend Toru Takemitsu. He is the first Japanese composer to write for a world audience and achieve international recognition."
  
  wn.com/Toru_Takemitsu
• Uriel Nespoli
  Uriel Nespoli (January 15, 1884 – June 1973) was an Italian conductor born in Naples.
  A pupil of Leopoldo Mugnone, Nespoli specialized in Italian opera. He was considered a National Treasure to Italy, and in 1931 he was secretly brought to the United States for safety. He first served as music director of the Houston Symphony, which was reforming after a 13-year break, having dissolved in 1918 owing to World War I, and from general lack of funding. After conducting concerts in the spring of 1931 and for the entirety of the 1931-1932 season, Nespoli was dismissed from his post in Houston. He continued his conducting career in New York City. He was the third conductor to conduct Giacomo Puccini's famed opera La boheme, and reputedly never forgave Puccini for not having given him the premiere, as they had known each other well as colleagues in younger days. However, it is said that he was in Brazil at the time of its first performance.
  Among his musical colleagues was the operatic soprano Rosa Ponselle. He directed several future opera singers to her for lessons at her Villa Pace in Baltimore.
  
  wn.com/Uriel_Nespoli
• 
  Valery Gergiev
  Valery Abisalovich Gergiev PAR (Russian: Валерий Абисалович Гергиев, Ossetic: Гергиты Абисалы фырт Валери/Gergity Abisaly Fyrt Valeri; born 2 May 1953) is a Russian conductor and opera company director. He is general director and artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre, principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and artistic director of the White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg.
  Gergiev, born in Moscow, is the son of Tamara Tatarkanovna and Abisal Zaurbekovich. He and his siblings were raised in Vladikavkaz in their native North Ossetia in the Caucasus. He began piano at secondary school, before going on to study at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in Leningrad from 1972 to 1977. His principal conducting teacher was Prof. Ilya Musin (Илья Мусин), one of the greatest conductor-makers in Russian musical history. His sister, Larissa Gergieva, is a pianist and director of the Mariinsky's singers' academy.
  In 1978, he became assistant conductor at the Kirov Opera, now the Mariinsky Opera, under Yuri Temirkanov, where he made his debut conducting Sergei Prokofiev's War and Peace. He was chief conductor of the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra from 1981 until 1985 – the year he made his debut in the United Kingdom, along with pianist Evgeny Kissin, and violinists Maxim Vengerov and Vadim Repin, at The Lichfield Festival.
  
  wn.com/Valery_Gergiev
• 
  Vernon Duke
  Vernon Duke (10 October [O.S. 27 September] 1903 – January 16, 1969) was a Russian-American composer/songwriter, who also wrote under his original name Vladimir Dukelsky. He is best known for "Taking a Chance on Love" with lyrics by Ted Fetter and John Latouche, "I Can't Get Started" with lyrics by Ira Gershwin, "April in Paris" with lyrics by E. Y. ("Yip") Harburg (1932), and "What Is There To Say" for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1934, also with Harburg. He wrote the words and music for "Autumn in New York" (1934). Vernon collaborated with lyricists such as Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin, Ogden Nash and Sammy Cahn and his works have been performed and recorded by Count Basie, Bunny Berigan, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, the Modern Jazz Quartet, André Previn, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Wynton Marsalis, and many others.
  Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dukelsky (Russian: Владимир Александрович Дукельский) was born in 1903 into a noble family of mixed Georgian-Austrian-Spanish-Russian descent, in Parafianovo, Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. The 1954 Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians referred to "one of his grandparents" (Princess Tumanishvili) as having been "directly descended from the kings of Georgia". His birthplace, however, was a small railroad station in Minsk Governorate. At that time his mother "happened to be traveling by train". The Dukelskys resided in Kiev, and Vladimir's only visit to Saint Petersburg and Moscow occurred in the summer of 1915. The impressions of that remarkable summer were later echoed in Dukelsky's most daring classical composition, the Russian oratorio The End of St. Petersburg (1931–1937).
  
  wn.com/Vernon_Duke
• 
  Victor Borge
  Victor Borge ( /ˈbɔrɡə/ BOR-gə; 3 January 1909 – 23 December 2000), born Børge Rosenbaum, was a Danish and American comedian, conductor and pianist, affectionately known as The Clown Prince of Denmark,The Unmelancholy Dane, and The Great Dane.
  Borge was born Børge Rosenbaum in Copenhagen, Denmark, into a Jewish family. His parents, Bernhard and Frederikke Rosenbaum, were both musicians—his father a violist in the Royal Danish Orchestra and his mother a pianist. Like his mother, Borge began piano lessons at the age of two, and it was soon apparent that he was a prodigy. He gave his first piano recital when he was eight years old, and in 1918 was awarded a full scholarship at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, studying under Olivo Krause. Later on, he was taught by Victor Schiøler, Liszt's student Frederic Lamond, and Busoni's pupil Egon Petri.
  Borge played his first major concert in 1926 at the Danish concert-hall Odd Fellow Palæet (The Odd Fellow's Lodge building). After a few years as a classical concert pianist, he started his now famous "stand up" act, with the signature blend of piano music and jokes. He married American Elsie Chilton in 1933, the same year he debuted with his revue acts. Borge started touring extensively in Europe, where he began telling anti-Nazi jokes.
  
  wn.com/Victor_Borge
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  Victor de Sabata
  Victor de Sabata (April 10, 1892 – December 11, 1967) was an Italian conductor and composer. He is widely recognized as one of the most distinguished operatic conductors of the twentieth century, especially for his Verdi, Puccini and Wagner. He is also acclaimed for his interpretations of orchestral music. Like his near contemporary Wilhelm Furtwängler, de Sabata regarded composition as more important than conducting but achieved more lasting recognition for his conducting than his compositions. De Sabata has been praised by various authors and critics as a rival to Toscanini for the title of greatest Italian conductor of the twentieth century, and even as "perhaps the greatest conductor in the world".
  De Sabata was born in the city of Trieste, at the time part of Austria-Hungary, but now in Italy. His Roman Catholic father, Amedeo de Sabata, was a professional singing teacher and chorus master, and his mother, Rosita Tedeschi, a talented amateur musician, was Jewish. De Sabata began playing the piano at the age of four, and composed a gavotte for that instrument at the age of six. He composed his first work for orchestra at the age of twelve. His formal musical studies began after his family moved to Milan around 1900. In Milan, de Sabata studied at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory, excelling at piano, violin, theory, composition and conducting, and graduating cum laude in composition, piano and violin. He would remain a virtuoso pianist and violinist up until the end of his life. In 1911 he performed in an orchestra under the baton of Arturo Toscanini who influenced him to become a conductor. De Sabata's first opera, Il macigno, was produced at the opera house of La Scala on March 31, 1917 to a mixed reception. It was frequently performed during the next few years.
  
  wn.com/Victor_de_Sabata
• 
  Victor Herbert
  Victor August Herbert (February 1, 1859 – May 26, 1924) was an Irish-born, German-raised American composer, cellist and conductor. Although Herbert enjoyed important careers as a cello soloist and conductor, he is best known for composing many successful operettas that premiered on Broadway from the 1890s to World War I. He was also prominent among the tin pan alley composers and was later a founder of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). A prolific composer, Herbert produced two operas, a cantata, 43 operettas, incidental music to 10 plays, 31 compositions for orchestra, nine band compositions, nine cello compositions, five violin compositions with piano or orchestra, 22 piano compositions and numerous songs, choral compositions and orchestrations of works by other composers, among other music.
  In the early 1880s, Herbert began a career as a cellist in Vienna, Austria, and Stuttgart, Germany, during which he began to compose orchestral music. Herbert and his opera singer wife, Therese Förster, moved to the U.S. in 1886 when both were engaged by the Metropolitan Opera. In the U.S., Herbert continued his performing career, while also teaching at the National Conservatory of Music, conducting and composing. His most notable instrumental compositions were his Cello Concerto No. 2 in E minor, Op. 30 (1894), which entered the standard repertoire, and his Auditorium Festival March (1901). He led the Pittsburgh Symphony from 1898 to 1904 and then founded the Victor Herbert Orchestra, which he conducted throughout the rest of his life.
  
  wn.com/Victor_Herbert
• 
  Vladimir Ashkenazy
  Vladimir Davidovich Ashkenazy (Russian: Владимир Давидович Ашкенази, Vladimir Davidovič Aškenazi; born July 6, 1937) is a Russian-Icelandic conductor and pianist. Since 1972 he has been a citizen of Iceland, his wife Þórunn's country of birth. Since 1978, because of his many obligations in Europe, he and his family have resided in Meggen, near Lucerne in Switzerland. He is currently Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
  Ashkenazy was born in Gorky, Soviet Union (now Nizhny Novgorod, Russia), to the pianist and composer David Ashkenazi and to the actress Yevstolia Grigorievna, born Plotnova. His father was Jewish and his mother was the daughter of a family of Russian Orthodox peasants. He began playing piano at the age of six and, showing prodigious talent, was accepted to the Central Music School at age eight studying with Anaida Sumbatyan. Ashkenazy went on to graduate from the Moscow Conservatory where he studied with Lev Oborin and Boris Zemliansky, winning second prize in the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1955 and the first prize in the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition in Brussels in 1956. He shared the first prize in the 1962 International Tchaikovsky Competition with British pianist John Ogdon. As a student, like many in that period, he was harassed by the KGB to become an "informer." He did not really cooperate, and despite pressures from the authorities, in 1961 married the Iceland-born Þórunn Jóhannsdóttir, who studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory. To marry Ashkenazy, Þórunn was forced to give up her Icelandic citizenship and declare that she wanted to live in the USSR.
  
  wn.com/Vladimir_Ashkenazy
• Walter Weller
  Walter Weller (born 30 November 1939) is an Austrian conductor and violinist.
  Weller was born in Vienna, Austria where he first gained renown as a prodigy on the violin. His father, also named Walter, was a violinist in the Vienna Philharmonic, and at the age of 17, the young Weller became a member, and by the unusually early age of 22 he had become joint concertmaster with Willi Boskovsky. He remained in this post for 11 years.
  While leading the orchestra, Weller also established and led his own string quartet from 1958 to 1969. In 1966 he married Elisabeth Samohyl with whom he had a son.
  Weller’s first engagements as a conductor were in 1966, deputising at short notice for Karl Böhm in Beethoven’s Pastoral and Franz Schubert’s Great C Major symphonies and Josef Krips Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Claudio Arrau and Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.
  From 1969 Weller conducted regularly at the Vienna Volksoper and the Vienna State Opera.
  After this he conducted in Duisburg, Germany. In 1977 he relocated to Great Britain to become principal conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. This was followed by stints with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from 1980 to 1986 and from 1992 to 1997 with the Scottish National Orchestra where he remains Conductor Emeritus. The Bank of Scotland honoured Weller by printing his portrait on a special 50 pound note. He was the last Chief Conductor of the Basel Symphony Orchestra (before that ensemble joined with the Radio Symphony Orchestra Basel to form the Sinfonieorchester Basel) and General Music Director Allgemeine Basler Musikgesellshaft (site in German) from 1994 until 1997 overlapping with his appointment as the principal guest conductor of the Spanish National Orchestra from 1987 until 2002.
  
  wn.com/Walter_Weller
• 
  Willem Mengelberg
  Joseph Willem Mengelberg (28 March 1871 – 21 March 1951) was a Dutch conductor, famous for his performances of Mahler and Strauss with the Concertgebouw Orchestra.
  Mengelberg was the fourth of fifteen children of German-born parents in Utrecht, Netherlands. His father was the well-known Dutch-German sculptor Friedrich Wilhelm Mengelberg. After studies in Utrecht with the composer and conductor Richard Hol, the composer Anton Averkamp (1861–1934) and the violinist Henri Wilhelm Petri (1856–1914), he went on to study piano and composition at the Cologne conservatory (now the Hochschule für Musik Köln ), where his principal teachers were Franz Wüllner and Adolf Jensen.
  In 1891, when he was 20, he was chosen as General Music Director of the city of Lucerne Switzerland, where he conducted an orchestra and a choir, directed a music school, taught piano lessons and continued to compose.
  Four years later, in 1895, when he was 24, Mengelberg was appointed principal conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, a position he held until 1945.
  
  wn.com/Willem_Mengelberg
• William Kraft
  William Kraft (born 1923, in Chicago, Illinois) is a composer, conductor, teacher, and percussionist.
  Mr. Kraft was awarded two Anton Seidl Fellowships at Columbia University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree cum laude in 1951 and a master’s degree in 1954. He studied composition with Jack Beeson and Henry Cowell, orchestration with Henry Brant, percussion with Morris Goldenberg, timpani from Saul Goodman, and conducting with Rudolph Thomas and Fritz Zweig.
  During his years in New York, Kraft was also active as a freelance musician and had the privilege of working with some of the most well known musicians of the mid-twentieth century. Kraft thoroughly enjoyed doing freelance work. Among his gigs, he played as an extra percussionist for the Metropolitan Opera and played percussion and conducted for Ondine.
  In 1954, Kraft joined the Dallas Symphony. After only one season there, he moved to Los Angeles.
  He took a position with the Los Angeles Philharmonic beginning in the 1955/56 season. He spent 25 years in the orchestra, the first eight as a member of the percussion section, and the remaining 17 as principal timpanist. Kraft was also the assistant conductor of the orchestra for 3 seasons under Zubin Mehta. From 1981-85, Kraft was the Composer-in-Residence for the orchestra, during which time he was also responsible for the founding and directing of the Philharmonic’s New Music Group.
  
  wn.com/William_Kraft
• 
  William Walton
  Sir William Turner Walton OM (29 March 1902 – 8 March 1983) was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera. His best-known works include Façade, the cantata Belshazzar's Feast, the Viola Concerto, and the First Symphony.
  Born in Lancashire, the son of a musician, Walton was a chorister and then an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford. On leaving the university, he was taken up by the literary Sitwell siblings, who provided him with a home and a cultural education. His earliest work of note was a collaboration with Edith Sitwell, Façade, which at first brought him notoriety as a modernist, but later became a popular ballet score.
  In middle age, Walton left Britain and set up home with his young wife on the Italian island of Ischia. By this time, he had ceased to be regarded as a modernist, and some of his compositions of the 1950s were criticised as old-fashioned. His only full-length opera, Troilus and Cressida, was among the works to be so labelled and has made little impact in opera houses. In his last years, his works came back into critical fashion; his later compositions, dismissed by critics at the time of their premieres, were revalued and regarded alongside his earlier works.
  
  wn.com/William_Walton
• 
  Willie Nelson
  Willie Hugh Nelson (pronounced /wɪli nɛlsən /; born April 30, 1933) is an American country music singer-songwriter, as well as an author, poet, actor, and activist. The critical success of the album Shotgun Willie (1973), combined with the critical and commercial success of Red Headed Stranger (1975) and Stardust (1978), made Nelson one of the most recognized artists in country music. He was one of the main figures of outlaw country, a subgenre of country music that developed at the end of the 1960s as a reaction to the conservative restrictions of the Nashville sound. Nelson has acted in over 30 films, co-authored several books, and has been involved in activism for the use of biofuels and the legalization of marijuana.
  
  wn.com/Willie_Nelson
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  Yehudi Menuhin
  Yehudi Menuhin, Baron Menuhin, OM, KBE (22 April 1916 – 12 March 1999) was an American violinist and conductor who spent most of his performing career in the United Kingdom. He was born to Russian Jewish parents in the United States, but became a citizen of Switzerland in 1970, and of the United Kingdom in 1985. He is often considered to be one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century.
  Yehudi Menuhin was born in New York City, United States, to Bielorussian Jewish parents from what is now Belarus. His sisters were the concert pianist and human rights worker Hephzibah Menuhin and the pianist, painter, and poet Yaltah Menuhin. Through his father Moshe Menuhin, a former rabbinical student and anti-Zionist writer, Menuhin was descended from a distinguished rabbinical dynasty.
  Menuhin began violin instruction at age four under violinist Sigmund Anker; his parents had wanted Louis Persinger to be his teacher, but Persinger refused. Menuhin displayed extraordinary talents at an early age. His first solo violin performance was at the age of seven with the San Francisco Symphony in 1923. Persinger then agreed to take Menuhin as a student. When the Menuhins went to Paris, Persinger suggested Yehudi go to his own teacher, Eugène Ysaÿe. He did have one lesson with Ysaÿe, but did not like his method or the fact that he was very old. Instead, he went to the Romanian composer and violinist George Enescu, after which he made several recordings with his sister Hephzibah. He was also a student of Adolf Busch. In 1929 he played in Berlin, under Bruno Walter's baton, three concerti by Bach, Brahms and Beethoven. In 1932 he recorded Edward Elgar's Violin Concerto in B minor for HMV in London, with the composer himself conducting, and between 1934 and 1936 he made the first integral recording of Johann Sebastian Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin.
  
  wn.com/Yehudi_Menuhin
• 
  Yo-Yo Ma
  Yo-Yo Ma (born October 7, 1955) is an American cellist, virtuoso, and orchestral composer. He has received multiple Grammy Awards, the National Medal of Arts in 2001 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. Ma is regarded by some as the most famous cellist of the modern age.
  Yo-Yo Ma was born in Paris on October 7, 1955, to Chinese parents and had a musical upbringing. His mother, Marina Lu, was a singer, and his father, Hiao-Tsiun Ma, was a violinist and professor of music at Nanjing National Central University. His family moved to New York when he was five years old.
  At a very young age, Ma began studying violin, and later viola, before settling on the cello in 1960 at age four. According to Ma, his first choice was the double bass due to its large size, but he compromised and took up cello instead. The child prodigy began performing before audiences at age five, and performed for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower when he was seven. At age eight, he appeared on American television with his sister, Yeou-Cheng Ma, in a concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Ma attended Trinity School in New York but transferred to the Professional Children's School which he graduated at fifteen years of age. He appeared as a soloist with the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra in a performance of the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations.
  
  wn.com/Yo-Yo_Ma
• 
  Yuri Temirkanov
  Yuri Khatuevich Temirkanov (Russian: Ю́рий Хату́евич Темирка́нов) (born 10 December 1938) is a Russian conductor of Circassian (Kabardian) origin.
  Yuri Temirkanov has been the Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic since 1988.
  Born in 1938 in the Caucasus city of Nalchik, Temirkanov began his musical studies at the age of nine. When he was thirteen, he attended the Leningrad School for Talented Children where he continued his studies in violin and viola. Upon graduation from the Leningrad School, he attended the Leningrad Conservatory where he completed his studies in viola. He returned to the Conservatory to study conducting with Ilya Musin and graduated in 1965.
  After winning the prestigious All-Soviet National Conducting Competition in 1966, Mr. Temirkanov was invited by Kirill Kondrashin to tour Europe and the United States with legendary violinist David Oistrakh and the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra. Yuri Temirkanov made his debut with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra in early 1967 and was then invited to join the Orchestra as Assistant Conductor to Yevgeny Mravinsky. In 1968, he was appointed Principal Conductor of the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra where he remained until his appointment as Music Director of the Kirov Opera and Ballet in 1976.
  
  wn.com/Yuri_Temirkanov
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  Zubin Mehta
  Zubin Mehta (ज़ुबिन मेहता); pronounced [ˈzuːbɪn ˈmeːɦt̪aː] (born 29 April 1936) is an Indian conductor of western classical music. He is the Music Director for Life of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.
  Zubin Mehta was born into a Parsi family in Bombay, British India, the son of Mehli and Tehmina Mehta. His father Mehli Mehta was a violinist and founding conductor of the Bombay Symphony Orchestra. Mehta is an alumnus of St. Mary's School, Mumbai, and St. Xavier's College, Mumbai. Mehta initially intended to study medicine, but eventually became a music student in Vienna at the age of 18, under Hans Swarowsky. Also at the same academy along with Mehta were conductor Claudio Abbado and conductor–pianist Daniel Barenboim.
  Mehta's first marriage was to Canadian soprano Carmen Lasky in 1958. They have a son, Mervon and a daughter, Zarina. In 1964, they divorced. Two years after the divorce, Carmen married Zubin's brother, Zarin Mehta, now the Executive Director of the New York Philharmonic. In July 1969, Mehta married Nancy Kovack, a former American film and television actress. Mehta is a permanent resident of the United States, but retains his Indian citizenship.
  
  wn.com/Zubin_Mehta
• Øivin Fjeldstad
  Øivin Fjeldstad (2 May 1903—16 October 1983) was a Norwegian conductor and violinist who led the Oslo Philharmonic from 1962 to 1969.
  A native of Oslo, Øivin Fjeldstad debuted as a violinist in 1921 following musical instruction in the conservatories of Oslo and Leipzig. Ten years later, having studied with Clemens Krauss in Berlin, he began his conducting career in Oslo and, after the end of World War II and the founding of the Norwegian Radio Orchestra (Kringkastingsorkestret) in 1946, he became its head conductor. Between 1958 and 1960, the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet had Kirsten Flagstad as its general manager and Øivin Fjeldstad as its first artistic director. In 1962 he, along with Herbert Blomstedt, succeeded Odd Grüner-Hegge as head conductor of Oslo Philharmonic, the nation's leading orchestra, becoming one of the most influential figures in his country's postwar musical history. He was awarded the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav, which is bestowed for remarkable accomplishments on behalf of native land and humanity.
  
  wn.com/Øivin_Fjeldstad

• The Rag-Time Dance
• The Easy Winner
• Bethena (A Concert Waltz)
• Magnetic Rag
• The Strenuous Life (Rag-Time Two-Step)
• The Entertainer
• Elite Syncopations
• Solace
• Pine Apple Rag
• Sugar Cane
• Look at Him Go
• Little Face
• Who Reads Reviews
• Night Thoughts
• A Different Kind Of Blues
• Chocolate Apricot
• The Five Of Us
• Make Up Your Mind

• One Note Samba
• People
• Bluesette
• Call Me Irresponsible
• Corcovado
• Kiss Me, Stupid
• Never You Mind
• The Girl From Ipanema
• Gravy Waltz
• Sunrise, Sunset
• Manha De Carnaval
• Goodbye Charlie

• Misty
• What's New
• P.S. I Love You
• Gone With the Wind
• Over the Rainbow
• Stormy Weather
• I've Got the World on a String
• One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)
• When the Sun Comes Out
• Lost in the Stars

• You Did It
• The Rain in Spain
• Without You
• I Could Have Danced All Night
• On the Street Where You Live
• With a Little Bit of Luck
• I've Grown Accustomed to Your Face
• I'm an Ordinary Man
• Wouldn't It Be Loverly
• Get Me to the Church on Time

• Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64: I. Allegro molto appassionato
• Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64: II. Andante
• Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64: III. Allegretto non troppo - Allegro molto vivace
• Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 49: I. Molto allegro agitato
• Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 49: II. Andante con moto tranquillo
• Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 49: III. Scherzo: Leggiero e vivace
• Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 49: IV. Finale: Allegro assai appassionato
• Violin Sonata in F major: I. Allegro vivace
• Violin Sonata in F major: II. Adagio
• Violin Sonata in F major: III. Assai vivace

• Angel Eyes
• Second Time Around
• André's Blues
• Darkest Before the Dawn
• What Is This Thing Called Love
• Night and Day
• Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered
• I Can't Get Started
• My Ship
• Skylark
• I Didn't Know What Time It Was/Ship Without a Sail
• It Might as Well Be Spring
• You're Gonna Hear From Me

• Get Me To The Church On Time
• On The Street Where You Live
• I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face
• Wouldn't It Be Loverly
• Ascot Gavotte
• Show Me
• With A Little Bit Of Luck
• I Could Have Danced All Night
• I Got It Bad And That Ain't Good
• Take The "A" Train
• This Can't Be Love
• Should I?
• Hallelujah!
• Just One Of Those Things
• September In The Rain
• Lullaby Of Broadway
• Black And Blue
• I've Got A Feeling I'm Falling
• Honeysuckle Rose
• Who's Sorry Now?

• A Foggy Day
• Nice Work If You Can Get It
• But Not for Me
• Let's Call the Whole Thing Off
• How Long Has This Been Going On?
• Who Cares?
• I've Got a Crush on You / Someone to Watch Over Me / Embraceable You
• They Can't Take That Away From Me

• Tango Song and Dance: Tango. Passionately
• Tango Song and Dance: Song. Simply
• Tango Song and Dance: Dance. Jazz Feeling
• Hungarian Dance No. 1 in G minor: Allegro molto
• Hungarian Dance No. 6 in D-flat major: Vivace
• Hungarian Dance No. 7 in A major: Allegretto
• Porgy and Bess - Summertime
• Porgy and Bess - It Ain't Necessarily So
• Porgy and Bess - Bess, You Is My Woman Now
• Porgy and Bess - My Man's Gone Now
• Schön Rosmarin
• Caprice viennois, Op. 2
• Liebesleid (Chagrin d'Amour)
• Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in A major, Op. 13: I. Allegro molto
• Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in A major, Op. 13: II. Andante
• Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in A major, Op. 13: III. Allegro vivo
• Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in A major, Op. 13: IV. Allegro quasi presto

• Like Love
• When I Fall in Love
• I Wish I Were in Love Again
• Falling in Love Again
• In Love in Vain
• Nothin' to Do With Love
• Love Is Here to Stay
• Love Me or Leave Me
• Looking for Love
• At Long Last Love
• Like Someone in Love
• I Love a Piano

• I Wonder What the King Is Doing Tonight
• What Do the Simple Folk Do?
• I Loved You Once in Silence
• Then You May Take Me to the Fair
• March
• If Ever I Would Leave You
• The Lusty Month of May
• The Simple Joys of Maidenhood
• Thinking of You
• When Will I Hear From You
• I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter
• P.S. I Love You
• Hello My Lover, Goodbye
• Yours Sincerely
• What's New
• Lost Letter
• I Remember You
• Don't Worry About Me
• Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me
• Signing Off

• Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27: I. Largo - Allegro moderato
• Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27: II. Scherzo (Allegro molto)
• Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27: III. Adagio
• Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27: IV. Finale (Allegro vivace)
• Vocalise, Op. 34, No. 14
• 'Aleko': Intermezzo
• 'Aleko': Woman's Dance

• Take the "A" Train
• Isfahan
• I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)
• Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me
• Chelsea Bridge
• Things Ain't What They Used to Be
• In a Sentimental Mood
• Squatty Roo
• Come Sunday
• Serenade to Sweden
• I Didn't Know About You
• In a Mellow Tone
• It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)

• A Streetcar Named Desire: Act 1, Scene 1. "They Told Me to Take a Streetcar Named Desire" (Blanche, Eunice)
• A Streetcar Named Desire: Act 1, Scene 1."Blanche!" / "Stella! Oh Stella!" (Stella, Blanche)
• A Streetcar Named Desire: Act 1, Scene 1. I Can Hardly Stand It (Stella)
• A Streetcar Named Desire: Act 1, Scene 1. You Left! I Stayed and I Struggled! (Blanche, Stella)
• A Streetcar Named Desire: Act 1, Scene 1. I... I... I... Took the Blows on My Face (Blanche, Stella)
• A Streetcar Named Desire: Act 1, Scene 1. Hey Mitch! Come Back Here (Stanley, Steve, Mitch, Eunice)
• A Streetcar Named Desire: Act 1, Scene 1. You Must Be Stanley. I'm Blanche (Blanche, Stanley, Stella)
• A Streetcar Named Desire: Act 1, Scene 2. "Hiyah, Sweetheart" (Stanley, Stella)
• A Streetcar Named Desire: Act 1, Scene 2. Let Me Enlighten You on a Point or Two (Stanley, Stella)
• A Streetcar Named Desire: Act 1, Scene 2. Hello Stanley. Do You Mind? (Blanche, Stanley, Stella)
• A Streetcar Named Desire: Act 1, Scene 2. Here! There Are Thousands of Papers (Blanche, Stanley, Stella)
• A Streetcar Named Desire: Act 1, Scene 3. "Well, I Ought to Be Getting Home" (Mitch, Stanley, Steve, Stella, Blanche)
• A Streetcar Named Desire: Act 1, Scene 3. Yes? Oh, Hello (Blanche, Mitch, Stanley, Stella, Steve)
• A Streetcar Named Desire: Act 1, Scene 3. "Stella!" / "Stanley, That's My... What Are You Doing" (Blanche, Stella, Stanley, Steve, Mitch, Eunice)
• A Streetcar Named Desire: Act 1, Scene 3. "Hmmm..." / "Stella? Stella?" (Stella, Blanche)

• Theme From 'Valley of the Dolls'
• It's Impossible
• Ann at Lawrenceville
• Chance Meeting
• Neely's Career Montage
• Come Play
• I'll Plant My Own Tree
• The Gillian Girl Commercial
• Jennifer's French Movie
• Give a Little More
• Jennifer's Recollection
• Theme From 'Valley of the Dolls' Reprise

• Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64: I. Allegro molto appassionato
• Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64: II. Andante
• Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64: III. Allegretto non troppo - Allegro molto vivace
• Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26: I. Allegro moderato
• Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26: II. Adagio
• Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26: III. Finale. Allegro energico

• Stompin' at the Savoy
• André Previn Introduction
• I Can't Get Started
• I'm Gonna Sit Right Down an Write Myself a Letter
• What'll I Do / Laura (medley)
• What Is This Thing Called Love
• Captain Bill
• Satin Doll
• Hi Blondie
• This Time the Dream's on Me
• Prelude to a Kiss / The Very Thought of You / Come Rain or Come Shine (medley)
• Sweet Georgia Brown

• Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
• Symphony No. 5 in D major: I. Preludio: Moderato
• Symphony No. 5 in D major: II. Scherzo (Presto misterioso)
• Symphony No. 5 in D major: III. Romanza: Lento
• Symphony No. 5 in D major: IV. Passacaglia: Moderato
• Reflections for cello, horn and orchestra

• Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47: I. Allegro moderato
• Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47: II. Adagio di molto
• Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47: III. Allegro, ma non tanto
• Serenade No. 1 in D major, Op. 69a: Andante assai
• Serenade No. 2 in G minor, Op. 69b: Lento assai
• Humoresque No. 1 in D minor, Op. 87 No. 1: Commodo

• Honey and Rue: I. First I'll Try Love
• Honey and Rue: II. Whose House Is This?
• Honey and Rue: III. The Town Is Lit
• Honey and Rue: IV. Do You Know Him?
• Honey and Rue: V. I Am Not Seaworthy
• Honey and Rue: VI. Take My Mother Home
• Knoxville: Summer of 1915
• Porgy and Bess: I Loves You, Porgy
• Summertime

• Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64: I. Andante - Allegro con anima
• Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64: II. Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza
• Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64: III. Valse: Allegro moderato
• Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64: IV. Finale: Andante maestoso - Allegro vivace
• March from Tsar Saltan Suite, Op. 57

• What's New
• I Remember You
• When Will I Hear From You
• Signing Off
• Perdido
• A Portrait of Bert Williams
• A Touch of Elegance
• What Am I Here For
• Le Sucrier velours
• Mack the Knife
• Bilbao-Song
• Trav'lin' Light
• Gone With the Wind
• Lost in the Stars
• Meet Me Halfway
• Bye Bye Blackbird
• Intersection
• Don't Sing Along

• Concerto for Piano, String Orchestra and Trumpet No. 1 in C minor, Op. 35: I. Allegretto - Allegro vivace
• Concerto for Piano, String Orchestra and Trumpet No. 1 in C minor, Op. 35: II. Lento
• Concerto for Piano, String Orchestra and Trumpet No. 1 in C minor, Op. 35: III. Moderato
• Concerto for Piano, String Orchestra and Trumpet No. 1 in C minor, Op. 35: IV. Allegro con brio
• Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 in F major, Op. 102: I . Allegro
• Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 in F major, Op. 102: II. Andante
• Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 in F major, Op. 102: III. Allegro
• Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra in D minor: I. Allegro ma non troppo
• Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra in D minor: II. Larghetto
• Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra in D minor: III. Finale. Allegro molto

• Look at Him Go
• Little Face
• Who Reads Reviews
• Night Thoughts
• A Different Kind of Blues
• Chocolate Apricot
• The Five of Us
• Make Up Your Mind

• Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
• A Sleepin' Bee
• Come Rain or Come Shine
• Stormy Weather
• Over the Rainbow
• Let's Fall in Love
• Day Dream / Prelude to a Kiss
• Good Queen Bess
• Things Ain't What They Used to Be
• It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing
• Five O'Clock Whistle
• Come Sunday
• C Jam Blues

• Concerto for Orchestra: Introduzione. Andante non troppo; Allegro vivace
• Concerto for Orchestra: Giuoco delle coppie. Allegretto scherzando
• Concerto for Orchestra: Elegia. Andante non troppo
• Concerto for Orchestra: Intermezzo interrotto. Allegretto
• Concerto for Orchestra: Finale. Pesante; Presto
• Sinfonietta: Allegretto
• Sinfonietta: Andante
• Sinfonietta: Moderato
• Sinfonietta: Allegretto
• Sinfonietta: Allegro

• The Planets, Op. 32: I. Mars, the Bringer of War
• The Planets, Op. 32: II. Venus, the Bringer of Peace
• The Planets, Op. 32: III. Mercury, the Winged Messenger
• The Planets, Op. 32: IV. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
• The Planets, Op. 32: V. Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age
• The Planets, Op. 32: VI. Uranus, the Magician
• The Planets, Op. 32: VII. Neptune, the Mystic

• Toccata In D Minor
• Symphony No. 8 (Except First Movement)
• Executive Party
• Symphony No. 5 (Except Third Movement)
• Adagio
• Waltz From "Sleeping Beauty"
• Executive Party Dance
• Symphony No. 5

• Embraceable You
• Street of Dreams
• They Didn't Believe Me
• Yes
• It Could Happen to You
• Again
• Michelle
• Who Can I Turn To
• Polka Dots and Moonbeams
• It's Good to Have You Near Again
• The Bad and the Beautiful
• Where or When

• Take Me out to the Ball Game
• Who's on First
• Called on Account of Rain
• In the Cellar Blues
• Batter Up
• Double Play
• Safe at Home
• Fungo
• Strike out the Band

• Please Can't We Be Enemies
• Lonely Girl in London
• Let Me Show You Off
• My Heart Is a Hunter
• Leprechauns Are Upon Me
• Warm Winter Day
• Carefree Love
• No
• Sea Shell
• Many Sides
• Gooney Bird
• Just for Now
• Forget Me

• 'Manfred' Symphony, Op.58 - I: Lento lugubre - Moderato con moto - And
• 'Manfred' Symphony, Op.58 - II: Vivace con spirito
• 'Manfred' Symphony, Op.58 - III: Andantecon moto
• 'Manfred' Symphony, Op.58 - IV: Allegro con fuoco
• Symphony No.2 - Marche slave, Op.31

• Concerto for Oboe in D major - Allegro Moderato
• Concerto for Oboe in D major - Andante
• Concerto for Oboe in D major - Vivace - attacca
• Concerto for Oboe in D major - Allegro
• Concerto for Natural Horn No.1 in E flat major - Allegro
• Concerto for Natural Horn No.1 in E flat major - Andante
• Concerto for Natural Horn No.1 in E flat major - Rondo. Allegro
• Second Horn Concerto - Allegro
• Second Horn Concerto - Andante con moto
• Second Horn Concerto - Rondo. Allegro molto
• Duet - Concertino for Clarinet and Bassoon - Allegro moderato
• Duet - Concertino for Clarinet and Bassoon - Andante
• Duet - Concertino for Clarinet and Bassoon - Rondo. Allegro ma non troppo

• Symphony No. 7, "Sinfonia antartica": Spoken introduction
• Symphony No. 7, "Sinfonia antartica": Prelude: Andante maestoso
• Symphony No. 7, "Sinfonia antartica": Spoken introduction
• Symphony No. 7, "Sinfonia antartica": Scherzo: Moderato; Poco animato
• Symphony No. 7, "Sinfonia antartica": Spoken introduction
• Symphony No. 7, "Sinfonia antartica": Landscape: Lento
• Symphony No. 7, "Sinfonia antartica": Spoken introduction
• Symphony No. 7, "Sinfonia antartica": Intermezzo: Andante Sostenuto
• Symphony No. 7, "Sinfonia antartica": Spoken introduction
• Symphony No. 7, "Sinfonia antartica": Epilogue: Alla marcia moderato (ma non troppo)
• Symphony No. 8 in D minor: Fantasia (Variazioni senza tema)
• Symphony No. 8 in D minor: Scherzo alla marcia (per stromenti a fiato)
• Symphony No. 8 in D minor: Cavatina (per stromenti ad arco)
• Symphony No. 8 in D minor: Toccata

• Overture
• But That's the Way You Are
• The World Belongs to the Young
• Let's Go Home
• Mademoiselle Cliche de Paris on the Corner of the Rue Cambon
• The Money Rings Out Like Freedom
• A Brand New Dress
• A Woman Is How She Loves
• Medley: Gabrielle / Coco
• Fiasco
• When Your Lover Says Goodbye
• Orbach's, Bloomingdale's, Best & Saks
• Medley: Always Mademoiselle / Coco (reprise)

• Mars, the Bringer of War
• Venus, the Bringer of Peace
• Mercury, the Winged Messenger
• Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
• Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age
• Uranus, the Magician
• Neptune, the Mystic
• Serenade to Music

• Westwood Walk
• Hi Blondie
• My Funny Valentine
• What Is This Thing Called Love?
• Come Sunday
• Fungo
• Chelsea Bridge
• Bye Bye Sky
• Batter Up
• Quiet Music / New Valley
• Oh, Lady Be Good
• I Got Rhythm

• More Than You Know
• It Could Happen to You: Rainy Day
• My Funny Valentine
• How Are Things in Glocca Morra?
• Have You Met Miss Jones: Nobody's Heart
• In Our Little Boat
• As Time Goes By
• My Melancholy Baby
• It Only Happens When I Dance Without You
• Angel Eyes
• In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning
• It Might as Well Be Spring
• The Second Time Around
• Dance of Life

• Scheherazade, Op. 35: I. The Sea and Sinbad's Ship
• Scheherazade, Op. 35: II. The Story of the Kalendar Prince
• Scheherazade, Op. 35: III. The Young Prince and the Young Princess
• Scheherazade, Op. 35: IV. Festival at Baghdad, The Sea, The Shipwreck
• La Valse

• Joy to the World
• Irish Carol
• Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
• Deck the Halls
• Angels from the Realm of Glory
• The Lamb of God
• Away in a Manger
• Sunny Bank (I Saw Three Ships)
• It Came Upon a Midnight Clear
• Greensleeves (What Child is This?)
• The Bells of Christmas
• God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen
• Wexford Carol
• Jingle Bells

• There'll Never Be Another You
• I Only Have Eyes for You
• What Am I Here For
• Limehouse Blues
• All the Things You Are
• Honeysuckle Rose
• I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good
• Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
• Cotton Tail
• Laura
• One for Bunz

• Why Are We Afraid
• Guido's Blackhawk
• Two by Two
• Bread and Wine
• Coffee Time
• A Rose and the End
• Should I
• Lo Ma, No Clothes
• Things Are Looking Down
• Analyst
• Like Blue
• Raising Caen

• Over the Rainbow
• Stormy Weather
• Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
• It Was Written in the Stars
• As Long as I Live
• That Old Black Magic
• The Morning After
• A Sleepin' Bee
• Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive
• Goose, Never be Peacock
• I Wonder What Became of Me?
• It's Only a Paper Moon
• Two Ladies in the Shade of the Banana Tree
• Cocoanut Sweet
• Right as the Rain
• I've Got the World on a String
• Come Rain or Come Shine
• This Time the Dream's on Me
• Let's Take a Walk Around the Block
• Last Night When We Were Young

• Piano Concerto No. 3: I. Allegretto
• Piano Concerto No. 3: II. Adagio religioso
• Piano Concerto No. 3: III. Allegro vivace
• Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26: I. Andante - Allegro
• Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26: II. Theme and Variations
• Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26: III. Allegro ma non troppo

• Cameraderie
• The Pools: All Mucked Up/The Pools/Aye Lad
• Footloose
• The Pleasure Of Your Company
• Stage Struck
• Dance Of Life
• Slippin' Around The Corner
• Good Companions
• A Little Travelling Music
• And Points Beyond
• Darkest Before Dawn
• Susie For Everybody
• Ta Luv
• I'll Tell The World
• Stage Door John
• Ta Love/Good Companions

• Ain't Misbehavin'
• Honeysuckle Rose
• Black and Blue
• I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling
• Oh, You Sweet Thing
• That's Where the South Begins
• Fatstuff
• Stealin' Apples

• Stardust / Skylark
• It Might as Well Be Spring
• My Funny Valentine
• Slowly / Laura
• Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered / (If They Asked Me) I Could Write a Book
• It Could Happen to You
• You Go to My Head
• Cabin in the Sky / Takin' a Chance on Love
• I Didn't Know What Time It Was / Little Girl Blue
• Easy Living