Astor Pantaleón Piazzolla was an Argentine tango composer, bandoneon player, and arranger. His works revolutionized the traditional tango into a new style termed nuevo tango, incorporating elements from jazz and classical music. A virtuoso bandoneonist, he regularly performed his own compositions with a variety of ensembles. In 1992, American music critic Stephen Holden described Piazzolla as "the world's foremost composer of Tango music".
Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE is an English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, known for numerous film scores, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano. He has written a number of operas, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; Letters, Riddles and Writs; Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs; Facing Goya; Man and Boy: Dada; Love Counts; and Sparkie: Cage and Beyond. He has written six concerti, five string quartets, and many other chamber works, many for his Michael Nyman Band. He is also a performing pianist. Nyman prefers to write opera over other forms of music.
The Kronos Quartet is an American string quartet based in San Francisco. It has been in existence with a rotating membership of musicians for almost 50 years. The quartet covers a very broad range of musical genres, including contemporary classical music. More than 900 works have been written for it.
Mark O'Connor is an American fiddle player and composer whose music combines bluegrass, country, jazz and classical. A three-time Grammy Award winner, he has won six Country Music Association Musician Of The Year awards and, was a member of three influential musical ensembles; the David Grisman Quintet, The Dregs and Strength in Numbers.
Waking Life OST is the official soundtrack of the film Waking Life. All tracks except numbers 6 and 9 were composed by Glover Gill and performed by the Tosca Tango Orchestra. Track 6 was originally composed by Frédéric Chopin and track 9 was composed by Julián Plaza.
Pablo Ziegler is an Argentine composer, pianist, arranger based in New York City. He is currently the leading exponent of nuevo tango, thanks to the skills and reputation he gathered while working extensively as Ástor Piazzolla's regular pianist from 1978 until the maestro's retirement for health reasons in 1989. During their collaboration, they performed with Milva, Placido Domingo, Gary Burton among others. He played with Piazzolla's re-formed Conjunto 9 in 1983 for his Teatro Colón concert with the Buenos Aires Philharmonic. In 1985 Ziegler composed the music for the film Adios Roberto, and in 1990, he established the New Tango Quartet.
Robert Xavier Rodríguez is an American classical composer, best known for his eight operas and his works for children.
Stafford James is an American double-bassist and composer.
Del Castillo is a Latin rock band based in Austin, Texas. The band's name comes from the last name of two brothers, Rick and Mark del Castillo, who founded the group.
Emilio Colón is an American solo cellist, chamber musician, conductor, composer and pedagogue. He is an international artist, concertizing in Canada, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Germany, Guatemala, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Malta, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.
Bryce David Dessner is an American composer and guitarist based in Paris, also known as a member of the rock band the National. Dessner's twin brother Aaron is also a member of the group. Together they write the music, in collaboration with lead singer / lyricist Matt Berninger.
Orquesta El Arranque is an Argentine tango orchestra formed in Buenos Aires in 1996.
Antonio Agri was an Argentine violinist, composer and conductor prominent in both the tango and classical music genres.
José Bragato was an Italian-born Argentine cellist, composer, conductor, arranger and musical archivist who, in his early career, was principal cellist in the Colón Theatre orchestra in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Apart from his involvement in classical music he also performed for many years in a number of Ástor Piazzolla's Nuevo tango ensembles where his cello solos, which had never before featured in tango, put him in the vanguard of Nuevo tango from its birth in the 1950s. Since then he has done numerous and varied arrangements of Piazzolla's compositions.
Quartet San Francisco is a non-traditional and eclectic string quartet led by violinist and String Masters co-founder Jeremy Cohen. The group played their first concert in 2001 and has recorded five albums. Playing a wide range of music genres including jazz, blues, tango, swing, funk, and pop, the group challenges the traditional classical music foundation of the string quartet.
Fernando Egozcue is an Argentinian guitarist and composer.
The Calder Quartet (CQ) is a string quartet based in Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1998 at the University of Southern California, the group takes its name from American sculptor Alexander Calder. The ensemble is currently composed of its founding members, including violinists Benjamin Jacobson and Tereza Stanislav, violist Jonathan Moerschel, and cellist Eric Byers. Los Angeles Times music critic, Mark Swed called the CQ "one of America's great string quartets." In 2014, the CQ was awarded one of Lincoln Center's prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grants for "professional assistance and recognition to talented instrumentalists who the Recommendation Board and Executive Committee believe have great potential."
Daniel Rojas is a Chilean-born Australian pianist and composer. Rojas' work as a composer and improviser draws upon indigenous, folk, popular and classical Latin American traditions.
Gregor Huebner is a violinist, pianist and composer. He performs solo and with several ensembles including El Violin Latino, Sirius Quartet, Berta Epple and Salsafuerte. From 1985 to 2012 he was a member of Tango Five. He is a professor of composition at the University for Music and Theater in Munich, Germany. In 2017 he received the Grand Prize for New York Philharmonic's New World Initiative Composition Challenge for his composition “New World, Nov 9. 2016.”
Christoph H. Müller is a Swiss musician, composer, producer and audio engineer.
