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Violinist Randall Goosby has accumulated an impressive list of awards and achievements. A large part of his mission as a musician is to support and promote African-Americans in classical music.

Goosby began playing in 2004 when he was seven years old. In 2010, the 13-year-old won first place in the Sphinx Concerto Competition junior division and Sphinx's Isaac Stern Award. This exposure led to other prestigious opportunities including becoming a student of Itzhak Perlman and Catherine Cho, as well as a multi-album recording contract with Decca. Goosby earned both his Bachelor and Master of Music from Juilliard and was a recipient of its Kovner Fellowship full scholarship program. He has performed with many major orchestras around the United States and in London. Goosby's debut album, Roots (2021), was a tribute to African-American composers of previous generations and the struggles they faced due to racism and the social climates of their times. ~ RJ Lambert

Max Bruch was a German composer who is remembered today primarily for his concertante works, but he was well known in the 19th century for his choral works. Viewed as a promising talent in his youth with an impressive technical and artistic mastery, he was considered a leading composer working in the traditional Romantic idiom until Brahms wrote his First Symphony. Because of his steadfast opposition to the New German School of Wagner and Liszt, and later to the music of "modernists" Strauss, Wolf, and Reger, Bruch gained the reputation of a conservative, and this label still alienates many listeners who accept an evolutionary paradigm of music history. The three works by Bruch that remain in the repertoire are his popular Violin Concerto No. 1, the Scottish Fantasy for violin and orchestra, and the single movement for cello and orchestra Kol Nidrei, but most of his other compositions -- including piano pieces, operas, symphonies, and other orchestral works -- are rarely performed and recorded. He was respected in his maturity as an educator and also conducted in posts as widely separated as Liverpool and Breslau.

Bruch was born in Cologne, on January 6, 1838. He took piano lessons from his mother, a voice teacher and former professional singer. Bruch started composing as a child, displaying an extraordinary musical talent that was recognized as such by Ignaz Moscheles. In 1852, he wrote a symphony and a string quartet, the latter work bringing him a scholarship from the Frankfurt-based Mozart foundation, which enabled him to study from 1853 to 1857: the piano with Ferdinand Breunung and Carl Reinecke, and composition with Ferdinand Hiller, who would become a lifelong friend and adviser. In 1858, having embarked on a teaching career in Cologne, he produced his first work bearing an opus number: the comic opera Scherz, List und Rache, Op. 1, after Goethe. In 1861, Bruch departed for Berlin, where he would spend time making valuable contacts with luminaries of the day like von Bülow and Taubert. From 1862 to 1864, he lived in Mannheim, where he wrote his cantata Frithjof and the opera Die Loreley, both of which audiences received with great enthusiasm.

After leaving his Mannheim post, Bruch visited Paris and Brussels, eventually accepting the position of music director in Koblenz in 1865. Before leaving that post in 1867, he produced the Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26, and several choral works. He moved on to Sonderhausen and achieved more success with his Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2. In 1870, Bruch moved to Berlin, where his third opera, Hermione, was produced in 1872. It was a failure, but his choral work Odysseus (1872) triumphed. Between 1873 and 1878, enjoying his reputation as an eminent German composer, Bruch worked independently in Bonn. After the glorious 1878 premiere in England of his Violin Concerto No. 2, the same work was received coldly back in Bonn, where it shared the bill with the newly composed First Symphony by Brahms, upon which critics heaped lavish praise. Thereafter, Bruch lived in the shadow of Brahms. Nevertheless, he turned out two of his most popular works in the period of 1878 to 1880: the Scottish Fantasy for violin and orchestra, and Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra.

Bruch then accepted the position of conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic in 1880, and married 17-year-old contralto Clara Tuczek, on January 3, 1881. In 1883 Bruch became director of the Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) Orchesterverein, where he stayed through the end of the season in 1890. During that period, he composed several significant choral works, including Achilleus (1885) and the cantata Das Feuerkreuz (1889). In 1891, he was appointed professor of composition at the Berlin Akademie, where he remained until his retirement in 1910; he retained his rank as a professor there until his death in 1920. Bruch declared his 1893 In Memoriam, for violin and orchestra (without strings), his best work. In his later years, the composer focused more on small-scale works, such as the 1910 Eight Pieces for clarinet, viola, and piano. Bruch died on October 20, 1920. ~ TiVo Staff

The first African-American woman whose music was played by a major symphony orchestra, Florence Price was a pioneering figure in 20th century American music. In the 21st century, her music has been performed increasingly often, especially since a large cache of her compositions was rediscovered in 2009.

Price was born Florence Beatrice Smith in Little Rock, Arkansas, on April 9, 1887. Her father was a dentist, and her mother was a music teacher. She and her two siblings all took music lessons, and she emerged as the prodigy of the group, giving her first performance at age four. Price and African American composer William Grant Still attended the same elementary school. By the time she graduated as valedictorian of her segregated Catholic high school class, she had already published her first compositions. She attended the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, studying piano and organ with the plan of becoming a music teacher. She also took composition lessons from George Whitefield Chadwick, who believed with Dvořák that the music of African Americans could form the basis of an American national school of composition; he encouraged her. Graduating in 1906, she returned to Arkansas, teaching for several years and then moving to Atlanta to head the music department at historically Black Clark Atlanta University. There, she married lawyer Thomas J. Price. The couple and their son fled the South in 1927 for Chicago, where Price took more composition lessons from Leo Sowerby, William Dawson, and the popular song composer Will Marion Cook.

After Price and her husband divorced, she experienced several lean years, and she moved in with her student Margaret Bonds, making a living by writing jingles for radio commercials. Things picked up in 1932 when she took several honors in the Rodman Wanamaker Competition, and the following year, her Symphony No. 1 in E minor was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under conductor Frederick Stock. This was the first performance of music of an African American woman by a major orchestra. Price performed her Piano Concerto in D minor with the Chicago Women's Symphony in 1934. She wrote a large body of choral music that was performed on Chicago radio, as well as chamber music, keyboard music, and songs. In the late 1930s, soprano Marian Anderson performed her setting of Langston Hughes' poem cycle Songs to the Dark Virgin. Price's compositions rarely quote African American spirituals directly, but they use structural devices such as call-and-response that are characteristic of African American music.

Price wrote three more symphonies and a suite for strings that was commissioned and performed by conductor John Barbirolli. Her vocal works were performed by such major African American singers as Leontyne Price, William Warfield, and Roland Hayes. She died after a stroke in Chicago on June 3, 1953. During the dominance of modernist styles in the 1960s and '70s, her music was largely forgotten. The revival of interest in music by women brought some of her works to light, and her reputation took a large step forward in 2009 with the discovery of a large group of her works, including one of her symphonies, in a house in St. Anne, Illinois, where she had sometimes stayed in the summer. More of Price's works were published and recorded, some by conductor John Jeter, who has championed her orchestral music. In 2021, pianist Lara Downes included Price in her Rising Sun project, a planned series of releases showcasing music by composers of various backgrounds. ~ James Manheim

Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin has had one of the most meteoric rises of any conductor of the early 21st century. Since conducting virtually all of the major Canadian orchestras while still in his twenties, he has established a substantial international career.

Nézet-Séguin was born in Montreal on March 6, 1975. He began studying piano at age five and decided on a career as a conductor at age ten after attending a performance by the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal under Charles Dutoit. He studied piano, chamber music, conducting, and composition at the Conservatoire de Musique du Québec, and he studied choral conducting at Westminster Choir College. When he was 14, he began leading rehearsals of the Chœur polyphonique de Montréal at the Montréal Cathedral; he became the group's conductor in 1994, at age 19. That same year, Nézet-Séguin, who had a lifelong admiration for the work of Carlo Maria Giulini, was invited to follow the famed conductor for a year, observing rehearsals and concerts and working extensively with Giulini during his final year of public performances. In 1995, Nézet-Séguin founded Le Chapelle de Montréal, a vocal and instrumental group that began with a focus on the Baroque. He continued performing with this group until 2002.

From 1998 until 2002, Nézet-Séguin was the chorus master and assistant conductor of L'Opéra de Montréal. In 2000, he was named the artistic director and principal conductor of Orchestre Métropolitain du Montréal. From 2008 until 2018, he served as conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, succeeding Valery Gergiev. From 2008 until 2014, he was the principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2012, Nézet-Séguin succeeded Dutoit as the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. In 2018, he was named the music director of the Metropolitan Opera, following annual appearances leading the company. He also took on the title of Honorary Conductor with the Rotterdam Philharmonic in 2018. The following year, after extending his contract several times, the Orchestre Métropolitain du Montréal awarded Nézet-Séguin a lifetime contract.

Nézet-Séguin records mainly for Deutsche Grammophon, but he has also recorded for several other labels. In addition, he is active as a pianist and is featured on a number of discs as a soloist or accompanist. In 2019, he released several albums, including Verdi, with the Orchestre Métropolitain du Montréal and soloist Ildar Abdrazakov. An unusually active 2021 saw eight releases, including his first-ever solo piano album, Introspection, and a Grammy Award-winning recording of Florence Price's first and third symphonies with the Philadelphia Orchestra. That year, he was the subject of Patrick Delisle-Crevier's book about his life and career, Raconte-moi Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The following year, he led the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in a cycle of Beethoven's symphonies, and he backed Lisa Batiashvili on her album Secret Love Letters, once again with the Philadelphia Orchestra. ~ Stephen Eddins & Keith Finke