Eugene George Istomin (November 26, 1925 – October 10, 2003) was an American pianist.

Istomin was born in New York City of Russian parents. He was famous for his work in a piano trio in which he collaborated with Isaac Stern and Leonard Rose. The Istomin-Stern-Rose Trio made many recordings, particularly of music by Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert. He also was known as a soloist, performing many concerts of orchestral music, with conductors such as Eugene Ormandy and Bruno Walter.

He was a child prodigy. His earliest public performances began at age six with his mother, and at 12 he entered the Curtis Institute. He went on to study under Rudolf Serkin and also Mieczysław Horszowski.

In 1943, at the age of 17, he won the Leventritt award and the Philadelphia Youth Award. He made his debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra with Eugene Ormandy, playing a concerto by Chopin, and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Artur Rodziński playing Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2 in the same week in 1943.

He performed with the conductor Rodzinski and the New York Philharmonic a second time in December 1944, playing Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto.

David Dubal (born Cleveland, Ohio) is an American pianist, teacher, author, broadcaster and painter.

Dubal has taught at the Juilliard School in New York since 1983 and the Manhattan School of Music since 1994. Mr. Dubal is the host of "The Piano Matters" a program of comparative piano performances that can be heard on WWFM-FM and wwfm.org and other U.S. radio stations. He was the host of a weekly radio show on WQXR-FM, entitled "Reflections from the Keyboard" until the radio station was sold to WNYC-FM. He is the author of several books, including The Art of the Piano, Evenings With Horowitz, and The Essential Canon of Classical Music, an encyclopaedic guide to the prominent composers of the Western canon. Dubal wrote and hosted The Golden Age of Piano, an Emmy Award winning documentary, produced by Peter Rosen.

Dubal has also performed recitals, master classes and lectures worldwide, and judged international competitions, including the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

Isaac Stern (Ukrainian: Исаак Стерн, Russian: Айзек Стерн; July 21, 1920 – September 22, 2001) was a Ukrainian-born violinist and conductor. He was renowned for his recordings and for discovering new musical talent.

Isaac Stern was born into a Jewish family in Kremenets, Ukraine. He was fourteen months old when his family moved to San Francisco. He received his first music lessons from his mother, then in 1928 enrolled at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he studied until 1931 before going on to study privately with Louis Persinger. He returned to the San Francisco Conservatory to study for five years with Naoum Blinder, to whom he said he owed the most. At his public début on February 18, 1936, aged 15, he played Saint-Saëns' Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor with the San Francisco Symphony under the direction of Pierre Monteux. Reflecting on his background, Stern once memorably quipped that cultural exchanges between the US and Soviet Russia were simple affairs: "They send us their Jews from Odessa, and we send them our Jews from Odessa."

Leonard Rose (July 27, 1918 – November 16, 1984) was an American cellist and pedagogue.

Rose was born in Washington, D.C.; his parents were immigrants from Kiev, Ukraine. Rose took lessons from Walter Grossman, Frank Miller and Felix Salmond and after completing his studies at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music at age 20, he joined Arturo Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra, and almost immediately became associate principal. At 21 he was principal cellist of the Cleveland Orchestra and at 26 was the principal of the New York Philharmonic.

He made many recordings as a soloist after 1951, including concertos with conductors such as Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy, George Szell and Bruno Walter among others. Rose also joined with Isaac Stern and Eugene Istomin in a celebrated piano trio.

Rose's legacy as a teacher remains to this day: his students from the Juilliard School, Curtis Institute and Ivan Galamian's Meadowmount Summer School fill the sections of many American orchestras, notably those of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic. His pupils include Lori Singer, Raymond Davis, Desmond Hoebig, Peter Stumpf, Fred Sherry, Christopher von Baeyer, Myung-wha Chung, Thomas Demenga, Stephen Kates, Lynn Harrell, Yehuda Hanani, Hans Jørgen Jensen, Eric Kim, Bruce Uchimura, Donald Whitton, Yo-Yo Ma, Ronald Leonard, Steven Pologe, Sara Sant'Ambrogio, Matt Haimovitz, Richard Hirschl, and John Sant’Ambrogio. He played an Amati cello dated 1662, played today by Gary Hoffman. Rose died in White Plains, New York, of leukemia.

Franz Peter Schubert (German pronunciation: [ˈfʁants ˈʃuːbɛɐ̯t]; 31 January 1797 – 19 November 1828) was an Austrian composer.

Although he died at the age of 31, Schubert was a prolific composer, having written some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies (including the famous "Unfinished Symphony"), liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music. Appreciation of Schubert's music during his lifetime was limited, but interest in his work increased significantly in the decades following his death. Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Felix Mendelssohn, among others, discovered and championed his works in the 19th century. Today, Schubert is seen as one of the leading exponents of the early Romantic era in music and he remains one of the most frequently performed composers.

Schubert was born in Himmelpfortgrund (now a part of Alsergrund), Vienna, on 31 January 1797. His father, Franz Theodor Schubert, the son of a Moravian peasant, was a parish schoolmaster; his mother, Elisabeth Vietz, was the daughter of a Silesian master locksmith, and had also been a housemaid for a Viennese family prior to her marriage. Of Franz Theodor's fourteen children (one illegitimate child was born in 1783), nine died in infancy; five survived. Their father was a well-known teacher, and his school in Lichtental, a part of Vienna's 9th district, was well attended. He was not a musician of fame or with formal training, but he taught his son some elements of music.