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Daniel Lessner is an American composer and virtuoso pianist currently based in Los Angeles.[ citation needed ]
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Daniel Lessner is an American composer and virtuoso pianist currently based in Los Angeles.[ citation needed ]
Daniel Lessner began his piano studies at the age of four in Miami, Florida. [1] He played his first recital at eleven, and by the age of eighteen he had won over a hundred local and national performance competitions. [2] He entered the Juilliard School of Music in New York city on scholarship to study with the renowned teacher Adele Marcus, and while there won the Tchaikovsky Concerto Competition [3] which he performed at Lincoln Center under the baton of Massimo Freccia.[ citation needed ] After receiving his bachelor's and master's degrees in music from Juilliard, Mr. Lessner was chosen as a candidate for the school's doctoral program,[ citation needed ] and he remained there on faculty for two seasons after finishing his PHD.[ citation needed ]
Daniel has performed in both solo and orchestral concerts around the world in four continents,[ citation needed ] including performances in New York's Carnegie Hall, and The Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles where he played Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme by Paganini.[ citation needed ] He has performed the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3, the Franz Liszt piano arrangement of Richard Wagner's Tannhauser Overture, Brahms Variations on a Theme by Paganini, Bach's Goldberg Variations, and the French Suite No. 6.[ citation needed ] He can currently be heard in the Clio Award winning United Airlines advertising campaign, featuring his performances of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.[ citation needed ]
In addition to performing, Daniel composes music for film and television in Hollywood.[ citation needed ] His composition clients have included themes for Carsey Warner Television, ABC sports, HBO's Inside The NFL, ESPN, and the USA Network.[ citation needed ] In 2006, Mr. Lessner formed the music production and recording studio SKANDA MUSIC with fellow composer William Richter of the Berklee College of Music. Their work together has included film scores, broadcast game show themes for the NBA Phoenix Suns and MLB's Tampa Bay Rays, commercials, music for The Museum of Terror, and the History Channel series That's Impossible.[ citation needed ]
Daniel Lessner has worked as a producer and as an artist and Repertoire Representative for EMI Records.[ citation needed ] He has been a professor of piano at USC's Thornton School of Music.
Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff was a Russian composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music. Early influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and other Russian composers gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom notable for its song-like melodicism, expressiveness and rich orchestral colours. The piano is featured prominently in Rachmaninoff's compositional output and he made a point of using his skills as a performer to fully explore the expressive and technical possibilities of the instrument.
The Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43, is a concertante work written by Sergei Rachmaninoff for piano and orchestra, closely resembling a piano concerto, all in a single movement. Rachmaninoff wrote the work at his summer home, the Villa Senar in Switzerland, according to the score, from 3 July to 18 August 1934. Rachmaninoff himself, a noted performer of his own works, played the piano part at the piece's premiere on 7 November 1934, at the Lyric Opera House in Baltimore, Maryland, with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski. Rachmaninoff, Stokowski, and the Philadelphia Orchestra made the first recording, on 24 December 1934, at RCA Victor's Trinity Church Studio in Camden, New Jersey. The English premiere on 7 March 1935 at Manchester Free Trade Hall also featured Rachmaninoff with The Hallé under Nikolai Malko.
Sergei Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30, was composed in the summer of 1909. The piece was premiered on November 28 of that year in New York City with the composer as soloist, accompanied by the New York Symphony Society under Walter Damrosch. The work often has the reputation of being one of the most technically challenging piano concertos in the standard classical piano repertoire.
Caprice No. 24 in A minor is the final caprice of Niccolò Paganini's 24 Caprices, and a famous work for solo violin. The caprice, in the key of A minor, consists of a theme, 11 variations, and a finale. His 24 Caprices were probably composed in 1807, while he was in the service of the Baciocchi court.
Grigory Lipmanovich Sokolov is a Russian pianist naturalized Spanish. He is among the most esteemed of living pianists, his repertoire spanning composers from the Baroque period such as Bach, Couperin or Rameau up to Schoenberg and Arapov. He regularly tours Europe and resides in Italy.
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