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In the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Itzhak Perlman has been acclaimed as being among the leading violinists before the public, and, without doubt, has been the most visible of them in media venues, from recordings and radio broadcasts to television and film appearances. No other concert violinist and few other serious musicians have achieved the widespread exposure and popularity attained by Perlman.

Itzhak Perlman was born in Tel Aviv on August 31, 1945. At the age of four he was stricken with polio, which caused permanent paralysis of his legs, leaving him to rely on crutches and braces for the rest of his life. Despite his handicap, young Itzhak began showing talent on the violin, and his father Chaim, a barber, quickly recognized his son's unusual abilities and arranged for lessons for him at the Music Academy of Tel Aviv. Soon Itzhak began giving concerts and attracting attention throughout Israel. American television talent agent Ed Sullivan learned of Perlman's abilities and brought the 13-year-old to New York for a 1959 appearance on his Caravan of Stars show.

Perlman and his parents subsequently took up residency in New York City, where the young virtuoso continued to attract attention. He enrolled at the Juilliard School of Music, studying with Ivan Galamian and Dorothy DeLay. He made his official debut in 1963 at Carnegie Hall with a performance of the F sharp minor Wieniawski Concerto and went on to win the Leventritt Competition, one of whose prizes was an appearance with the New York Philharmonic, then led by Leonard Bernstein.

After these triumphs Perlman was taken on by impresario Sol Hurok and given a heavy schedule of concerts in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Israel over the coming years. He also began making recordings with RCA and would eventually sign contracts with EMI, Sony, Teldec, and others. Over the next three decades, his recordings would include the concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, Mendelssohn, Berg, the two by Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio, Dvorak's Sonatina, Paganini's Caprices, and many others. In 1966, Perlman married Toby Friedlander. The couple would reside in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where they would raise five children. Perlman had begun teaching as well, and in 1975 took a faculty post at Brooklyn College.

Perlman's fame grew rapidly in the 1970s and he began appearing regularly on television programs, like the children's show Sesame Street, The Tonight Show, David Letterman, and various specials on the PBS network. He also became a frequent performer at White House events, especially during the Reagan administration. In 1986, President Reagan awarded him a Medal of Liberty, an award recognizing the contributions of foreign-born Americans. By 1990 Perlman had performed with virtually every major orchestra in the world and with almost every important conductor. He also signed a new contract that year with EMI, the label for whom he has made the most recordings.

In 1994, Perlman hosted a program on the PBS network called the Three Tenors, Encore!, that featured the singing of Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras. He also made a television special in 1995 for the PBS Great Performances series entitled In the Fiddler's House. Perlman has recently taken up conducting, his concerts including a Tanglewood Festival performance in 2000 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra that included critically successful readings of the Mozart Symphony No. 29 and the Brahms Symphony No. 4.

In the twenty-first century, Perlman's career continues to yield him triumph after triumph, placing him among this age's top five or six musicians in the classical realm.

The events of Beethoven's life are the stuff of Romantic legend, evoking images of the solitary creator shaking his fist at Fate and finally overcoming it through a supreme effort of creative will. His compositions, which frequently pushed the boundaries of tradition and startled audiences with their originality and power, are considered by many to be the foundation of 19th century musical principles.

Born in the small German city of Bonn on or around December 16, 1770, he received his early training from his father and other local musicians. As a teenager, he earned some money as an assistant to his teacher, Christian Gottlob Neefe, then was granted half of his father's salary as court musician from the Electorate of Cologne in order to care for his two younger brothers as his father gave in to alcoholism. Beethoven played viola in various orchestras, becoming friends with other players such as Antoine Reicha, Nikolaus Simrock, and Franz Ries, and began taking on composition commissions. As a member of the court chapel orchestra, he was able to travel some and meet members of the nobility, one of whom, Count Ferdinand Waldstein, would become a great friend and patron to him. Beethoven moved to Vienna in 1792 to study with Haydn; despite the prickliness of their relationship, Haydn's concise humor helped form Beethoven's style. His subsequent teachers in composition were Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and Antonio Salieri. In 1794, he began his career in earnest as a pianist and composer, taking advantage whenever he could of the patronage of others. Around 1800, Beethoven began to notice his gradually encroaching deafness. His growing despondency only intensified his antisocial tendencies. However, the Symphony No. 3, "Eroica," of 1803 began a sustained period of groundbreaking creative triumph. In later years, Beethoven was plagued by personal difficulties, including a series of failed romances and a nasty custody battle over a nephew, Karl. Yet after a long period of comparative compositional inactivity lasting from about 1811 to 1817, his creative imagination triumphed once again over his troubles. Beethoven's late works, especially the last five of his 16 string quartets and the last four of his 32 piano sonatas, have an ecstatic quality in which many have found a mystical significance. Beethoven died in Vienna on March 26, 1827.

Beethoven's epochal career is often divided into early, middle, and late periods, represented, respectively, by works based on Classic-period models, by revolutionary pieces that expanded the vocabulary of music, and by compositions written in a unique, highly personal musical language incorporating elements of contrapuntal and variation writing while approaching large-scale forms with complete freedom. Though certainly subject to debate, these divisions point to the immense depth and multifariousness of Beethoven's creative personality. Beethoven profoundly transformed every genre he touched, and the music of the 19th century seems to grow from his compositions as if from a chrysalis. A formidable pianist, he moved the piano sonata from the drawing room to the concert hall with such ambitious and virtuosic middle-period works as the "Waldstein" (No. 21) and "Appassionata" (No. 23) sonatas. His song cycle An die ferne Geliebte of 1816 set the pattern for similar cycles by all the Romantic song composers, from Schubert to Wolf. The Romantic tradition of descriptive or "program" music began with Beethoven's "Pastoral" Symphony No. 6. Even in the second half of the 19th century, Beethoven still directly inspired both conservatives (such as Brahms, who, like Beethoven, fundamentally stayed within the confines of Classical form) and radicals (such as Wagner, who viewed the Ninth Symphony as a harbinger of his own vision of a total art work, integrating vocal and instrumental music with the other arts). In many ways revolutionary, Beethoven's music remains universally appealing because of its characteristic humanism and dramatic power. ~ Rovi Staff

Russian-born Vladimir Ashkenazy has been a towering figure both as a pianist and as a conductor, with interpretations cutting a wide swath across Beethoven, the Romantics, and Russian music. His repertoire extends back to Bach and occasionally forward to contemporary pieces.

Ashkenazy was born July 6, 1937, in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) in the Soviet Union. His father was a pianist, but it was his mother who encouraged his pianistic gifts. Ashkenazy made his debut at eight in Moscow and enrolled at the Moscow Conservatory in 1955, becoming a student of Lev Oborin. An early breakthrough was a gold medal at the Brussels Queen Elizabeth International piano competition in 1956. Ashkenazy toured the U.S. in 1958 as the so-called Thaw under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev opened opportunities in the West. Back in Moscow, Ashkenazy married Icelandic pianist Dody Johannsdottir. The pair defected during a 1963 tour of Britain, and Ashkenazy soon began a recording career with the associated Decca and London labels, on whose roster he would remain for decades. He became an Icelandic citizen in 1972 and has also lived in Switzerland. In the early 1970s he began conducting as well. Ashkenazy became principal conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London from 1987 to 1994, of the Czech Philharmonic from 1998 to 2003, and of the Sydney Symphony in Australia from 2009 to 2013, as well as other groups, and he has been widely visible as a guest conductor, including in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Ashkenazy's piano playing is bright and incisive, with clear articulation and an intellectual depth that does not interfere with the production of warm feeling. He has exceptional control over tone color. His recorded repertory is vast, including complete cycles of the piano concertos of Mozart, Beethoven (three separate times), and Rachmaninov (twice), as well as of the piano sonatas of Beethoven, the piano works of Chopin, and the difficult sonatas of Scriabin. Ashkenazy's productivity has hardly dropped in old age, nor did the technical difficulty of the works he essayed, although he has been less likely to appear in public on the piano. Still recording for Decca, he issued a version of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, Op. 120, in 2007. The year 2011 alone saw no fewer than 19 Ashkenazy releases as pianist or conductor, including those of such taxing works as the Mahler Symphony No. 6. In 2017, Ashkenazy celebrated his 80th birthday with a new recording of Bach's French Suites, and his historical performances were well treated by recording companies. In 2018, new releases of two of Rachmaninov's symphonies, performed live by the Philharmonia Orchestra, appeared on the Signum Classics label. On January 17, 2020, Ashkenazy announced his retirement from public performing. ~ James Manheim