Emmanuel Pahud (b. January 27, 1970) is a Swiss flute player.

He was born in Geneva, Switzerland. His father is of French and Swiss background and his mother is French. The Berlin-based flutist is most known for his baroque and classical flute repertory.

Pahud was born into a non-musical family. As a young boy living in Italy, the sounds of the flute captivated Pahud. From the age of four to the age of 22, he was tutored and mentored by flutists such as François Binet, Carlos Bruneel and Aurèle Nicolet. Classically trained at the Conservatoire de Paris, he leapt into the international orchestral and solo music scene when he joined the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1992.

His versatility in music styles over the years has “signalled the arrival of a new master flautist” (The Guardian). He plays in diverse music genres, whether baroque, jazz, contemporary, classical, orchestral, or chamber music.

Travelling has been a big part of Emmanuel Pahud's life from birth. His father worked for a U.S. company, and the family moved repeatedly during his childhood. However, this would only shape Pahud's international outlook for his future. Only six weeks after Pahud was born, his parents moved to Baghdad for one year. They moved again when he was 1 to Paris, where Emmanuel's younger brother was born. In 1972, they then moved to Madrid for two years, and in 1974, finally settled in Rome for four years. In their apartment building in Rome, lived the Swiss-French Binet family whose four children played musical instruments. The father (François) was a flautist who studied in Zurich and Paris but stopped performing in later years. At the age of four, Pahud first heard the flute. As the eldest son Philippe played the Flute Concerto No. 1 (Mozart) K.313 in G Major, it set the course to a remarkable chapter of Pahud's life. He recalls:

Trevor David Pinnock CBE (born 16 December 1946) is an English conductor, harpsichordist, and occasional organist and pianist.

He is best known for his association with the period-performance orchestra The English Concert which he helped found and directed from the keyboard for over 30 years in baroque and early classical music. He is a former artistic director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra and founded The Classical Band in New York.

Since his resignation from The English Concert in 2003, Pinnock has continued his career as a conductor, appearing with major orchestras and opera companies around the world. He has also performed and recorded as a harpsichordist in solo and chamber music and conducted and otherwise trained student groups at conservatoires. Trevor Pinnock won a Gramophone Award for his recording of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos with the European Brandenburg Ensemble, an occasional orchestra formed to mark his 60th birthday.

Trevor Pinnock was born in Canterbury, where his grandfather had run a Salvation Army band. His father was Kenneth Alfred Thomas Pinnock, a publisher, and his mother, Joyce Edith, née Muggleton, was an amateur singer. In Canterbury, the Pinnock family resided nearby to the pianist Ronald Smith, from whose sister Pinnock had piano lessons. He became a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral when he was seven, attending the choir school from 1956 to 1961 and subsequently Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys. After receiving instruction in piano and organ, he served as a church organist; by the time he was 15, he began to play the harpsichord. At age 19, he won a Foundation Scholarship to the Royal College of Music to study organ and he also studied harpsichord, winning major prizes for performance on both instruments. His teachers were Ralph Downes and Millicent Silver. A strong early influence was Gustav Leonhardt, though he did not study with him.

Lowell Liebermann (born February 22, 1961 in New York City) is an American composer, pianist and conductor.

At the age of sixteen, Liebermann performed at Carnegie Hall, playing his Piano Sonata, op. 1. He studied at the Juilliard School of Music with David Diamond and Vincent Persichetti, gaining bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees.

His most recorded works are the Sonata for Flute and Piano (1987), the Gargoyles for piano (1989) and the Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (1992). Other notable works include a sonata for flute and guitar (1988), four cello sonatas (most recently 2008) the second piano concerto (1992), the opera The Picture of Dorian Gray (1996), a second symphony (2000), a trumpet concerto (2000), a violin concerto (2001), Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini for piano and orchestra (2001), and the opera Miss Lonelyhearts (2006) which was commissioned as part of the festivities surrounding the centennial of the Juilliard School. He was also commissioned by the Dranoff International Two Piano Foundation to compose "Three Lullabies" for two pianos.

Franz Benda (Czech: František Benda) (baptised 22 November 1709 – 7 March 1786) was a Czech violinist and composer. He was the brother of Jiří Antonín Benda, and he worked for much of his life at the court of Frederick the Great.

Benda was born in Bohemia at the town of Staré Benátky. Benda himself claimed to have been born 25 November, but baptism records show he was baptised three days earlier, on 22 November. His actual date of birth seems not to have been recorded, but it was probably no more than a day or two earlier than 22 November.

Benda became the founder of a German school of violin playing. In his youth he was a chorister at Prague and afterward in the Chapel Royal at Dresden. At the same time he began to study the violin, and soon joined a company of strolling musicians who attended fetes, fairs, etc. At eighteen years of age Benda abandoned this wandering life and returned to Prague, going to Vienna, where he pursued his study of the violin under Carl Heinrich Graun, a pupil of Tartini. After two years he was appointed chapel master at Warsaw. In 1732, he entered the service of Frederick the Great, then prince royal of Prussia, with whom he remained the rest of his life. He was a member of the prince royal's band, and later became concertmaster to the king. He played about 50,000 concertos over a period of forty years.

Claude-Achille Debussy (French pronunciation: [klod aʃil dəbysi]) (22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions. In France, he was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1903. A crucial figure in the transition to the modern era in Western music, he remains one of the most famous and influential of all composers.

His music is noted for its sensory component and for not often forming around one key or pitch. Often Debussy's work reflected the activities or turbulence in his own life. In French literary circles, the style of this period was known as symbolism, a movement that directly inspired Debussy both as a composer and as an active cultural participant.