LeraAuerbach

Lera Auerbach was born on 21 October 1973 in Chelyabinsk, near the Ural Mountains, in the Soviet Union. On a United States concert tour in 1991, she decided to remain in New York. Her subsequent education included piano and composition at the Juilliard School, where her teachers included Joseph Kalichstein, Milton Babbitt and Robert Beaser, comparative literature at Columbia University, and a piano diploma in Hanover. Her official biography identifies her today as Austrian-American.[1][3][2]

The piano has remained both an instrument of performance and a medium of composition. Her 1999 cycles of twenty-four preludes include separate works for solo piano and for cello and piano. They extend the compact prelude into a larger tonal sequence. On the BIS album Preludes and Dreams, Auerbach performs her own piano music; on Celloquy she plays alongside cellist Ani Aznavoorian. These recordings document the composer as an interpreter of her work, rather than only its author.[6][8][7][16]

Her collaborations also reach the stage. With choreographer and librettist John Neumeier, she created The Little Mermaid for the Royal Danish Ballet in 2005, drawing on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale. The original Copenhagen score and the later Hamburg version belong to the work’s history as distinct versions. This collaboration sits within a broader catalogue of ballet, opera, chamber music and orchestral writing, documented by her publisher and the institutions that perform her music.[12][13][5]

Large ensemble projects bring other subjects and collaborators into that catalogue. Symphony No. 4, Arctica, dates from 2019 and combines piano, choir and orchestra. Its development involved the National Geographic Society and an engagement with Arctic environments; the official work page credits Arctic Indigenous language and cultural advisors. Auerbach herself was the piano soloist at the Washington premiere. The work places her activities as composer and performer within a project that also involves language, place and environmental concern.[14][15][4]

Writing and visual art are continuing parts of her professional life. Her work includes Russian-language poetry and English-language aphorisms, as well as painting and sculpture. Institutional and official biographies describe these as active practices alongside music. Auerbach’s body of work is still developing, and can be approached through these different forms without reducing one to an illustration of another: a prelude cycle, a stage score, a text or an image each offers a different point of encounter.[2][5][4]

Tonality is an explicit compositional resource in Auerbach’s prelude cycles. Her notes on the piano and cello-and-piano sets describe a circle-of-fifths plan and the intention that short, individually complete pieces form a larger continuum. The scale and materials change in her stage and orchestral writing. The Little Mermaid uses a large orchestra that includes theremin, keyboards and percussion. Arctica combines piano, choir and orchestra with sound sources associated with water and ice, in a work connected to the Arctic and its environmental vulnerability. These documented choices provide concrete listening paths: the relationship of a miniature to a cycle, the placement of an instrumental color, or the way a musical work engages with a theatrical or geographical setting.[6][8][12][14][15]