Morton Estrin, the noted American pianist, was born in Burlington, Vermont in 1923. His career began in 1949 with a well-received recital at Town Hall. He studied with the noted teacher Vera Maurina-Press and others.

Estrin is well known for making the first-ever recording of Alexander Scriabin's complete opus 8 Etudes, which he re-recorded in 1991. Both recordings contain many of the hallmarks of Estrin's style - a robust tone, formidable technique, and an unusually large and sophisticated tonal palette.

Other notable recordings include a selection of Brahms intermezzos along with his Opus 119 piano pieces, and the complete Opus 32 Preludes of Sergei Rachmaninoff. These records, released in the early 1970s on the Connoisseur Society label, are among the best recordings of these works ever made, and continue to be available in re-release on CD. Rarely has the Rachmaninoff been rendered with such a balance of tone, energy, and romantic fervor. Rarely has Brahms sounded so robust. After being out of print for a number of years, these recordings, along with the rest of Estrin's output for the Connoisseur Society, have been re-released on CD.

Johannes Brahms (pronounced [joːˈhanəs ˈbʁaːms]; 7 May 1833  – 3 April 1897) was a German composer and pianist, and one of the leading musicians of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria, where he was a leader of the musical scene. In his lifetime, Brahms's popularity and influence were considerable; following a comment by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow, he is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the Three Bs.

Brahms composed for piano, chamber ensembles, symphony orchestra, and for voice and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works; he also worked with some of the leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim. Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire. Brahms, an uncompromising perfectionist, destroyed many of his works and left some of them unpublished.

Brahms is often considered both a traditionalist and an innovator. His music is firmly rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Baroque and Classical masters. He was a master of counterpoint, the complex and highly disciplined art for which Johann Sebastian Bach is famous, and also of development, a compositional ethos pioneered by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. Brahms aimed to honour the "purity" of these venerable "German" structures and advance them into a Romantic idiom, in the process creating bold new approaches to harmony and melody. While many contemporaries found his music too academic, his contribution and craftsmanship have been admired by subsequent figures as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg and Edward Elgar. The diligent, highly constructed nature of Brahms's works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers.

Anton Grigorevich Rubinstein (Russian: Анто́н Григо́рьевич Рубинште́йн, tr. Anton Grigor'evič Rubinštejn) (November 28 [O.S. November 16] 1829 – November 20 [O.S. November 8] 1894) was a Russian pianist, composer and conductor who became a pivotal figure in Russian culture when he founded the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. This, together with the Moscow Conservatory founded by his brother Nikolai, were the first music schools of their type in Russia. This proved no less controversial than other aspects of Rubinstein's career, as Russian culture was deeply divided and the nation itself was going through an identity crisis that would last for the rest of the 19th century. Rubinstein drew a tremendous amount of criticism about the conservatory from nationalistically minded individuals such as critic Vladimir Stassov and members of the group of composers known collectively as The Five.