Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, 6th Baronet CH (15 November 1897 – 1 October 1988) was an English writer, best known as an art critic and writer on architecture, particularly the baroque. He was the younger brother of Dame Edith Sitwell and Sir Osbert Sitwell.

He was the youngest child of Sir George Sitwell, 4th Baronet of Renishaw Hall. His mother was the former Lady Ida Emily Augusta Denison, a daughter of the Earl of Londesborough and a granddaughter of Henry Somerset, 7th Duke of Beaufort. She claimed a descent through female lines from the Plantagenets. Sitwell was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire and brought up in Derbyshire; he was educated at Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford. In World War I he served from 1916 in the British Army, in the Grenadier Guards.

After the war he went to Balliol but did not complete a degree, and was heavily involved in Osbert and Edith's projects. In 1925 he married a Canadian, Georgia Doble. Constant Lambert set to music The Rio Grande, one of his poems, and it was performed and broadcast in 1928.

Neagu Djuvara (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈne̯aɡu d͡ʒjuˈvara]; born August 18, 1916) is a Romanian historian, essayist, philosopher, journalist, novelist, and diplomat.

A native of Bucharest, he descended from an aristocratic Aromanian family. His father, Marcel, a graduate of the Technical University of Berlin and a Captain in the Romanian Army's Engineer Corps, died of Spanish flu in 1918; his mother, Tinca, was the last descendant of the Gradişteanu family of boyar origins (according to Djuvara, she was related to all boyar families in Wallachia). Djuvara's uncles Trandafir and Alexandru Djuvara were notable public figures. Djuvara was born during World War I; as an infant, he was taken by his family into refuge in Iaşi after the occupation of southern Romania by the Central Powers, and then, through Imperial Russia, into Belgium (where Trandafir Djuvara was Minister Plenipotentiary).

He attended lycée in Nice, France, and graduated in Letters (1937) and Law (1940) from the University of Paris (his Law thesis dealt with the antisemitic legislation passed by the governments of King Carol II in Romania). Djuvara later stated that, at the time, his political sympathies veered towards the far right: he became a supporter of the Romanian fascist movement, the Iron Guard, and took part in the February 1934 riot against the French Radical-Socialist government of Édouard Daladier.

Joseph Emil Villa (August 9, 1948 — April 13, 1995) was an American pianist.

He was born in Garfield, New Jersey. He studied at the Juilliard School under Sascha Gorodnitzki and made his debut at Alice Tully Hall in 1972. Most of his public appearances were not as a soloist, and his high reputation rests on a small number of recordings.

Villa died of AIDS on April 13, 1995, at Saint Vincent's Catholic Medical Center in Greenwich Village.

Franz Liszt (German: [fʁant͡s lɪst]); Hungarian: Liszt Ferencz, in modern use Liszt Ferenc) (October 22, 1811 – July 31, 1886) was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.

Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age. In the 1840s he was considered by some to be perhaps the greatest pianist of all time. He was also a well-known composer, piano teacher, and conductor. He was a benefactor to other composers, including Richard Wagner, Hector Berlioz, Camille Saint-Saëns, Edvard Grieg and Alexander Borodin.

As a composer, Liszt was one of the most prominent representatives of the "Neudeutsche Schule" ("New German School"). He left behind an extensive and diverse body of work in which he influenced his forward-looking contemporaries and anticipated some 20th-century ideas and trends. Some of his most notable contributions were the invention of the symphonic poem, developing the concept of thematic transformation as part of his experiments in musical form and making radical departures in harmony. He also played an important role in popularizing a wide array of music by transcribing it for piano.

John Andrew Howard Ogdon (27 January 1937 – 1 August 1989) was an English pianist and composer.

Ogdon was born in Mansfield Woodhouse, Nottinghamshire, and attended Manchester Grammar School, before studying at the Royal Northern College of Music between 1953 and 1957, where his fellow students under Richard Hall included Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Elgar Howarth and Peter Maxwell Davies. Together they formed New Music Manchester, a group dedicated to the performances of serial and other modern works. His tutor there was Claud Biggs. As a boy he had studied with Iso Elinson and after leaving college, he further studied with Gordon Green, Denis Matthews, Dame Myra Hess, and Egon Petri — the latter in Basel, Switzerland.

He won first prize at the London Liszt Competition in 1961 and consolidated his growing international reputation by winning another first prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1962, jointly with Vladimir Ashkenazy.

John Ogdon was able to play most pieces at sight and had committed a huge range of pieces to memory. He enjoyed fully using his vast talents, for example wanting to record the complete works for piano of Rachmaninoff (which constitute about 6-full length CDs). He did not record all these works, but those he did record - about half - were released in 2001. He recorded all ten Scriabin sonatas early in his career. Ogdon was also a formidable exponent of the works of Alkan and Busoni. In more familiar repertoire, he revealed deep musical sensibilities, always buttressed by a colossal technique. He also recorded a number of duo-piano works with his wife, Brenda Lucas (aka Brenda Lucas Ogdon).