Lera Auerbach was born Valeria Lvovna Averbakh on 21 October 1973 into a Russian-Jewish family in Chelyabinsk in the Urals; her mother was a piano teacher, with musicians among her own ancestors. She was composing early, and later said she was born to work in art and had felt it at four. She was allowed to visit the United States on a concert tour in 1991 and, after the Soviet Union collapsed, decided to stay, though she spoke no English. She graduated from Juilliard in piano, under Joseph Kalichstein, and composition, under Milton Babbitt and Robert Beaser, with her graduate work supported by a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship, and also read comparative literature at Columbia and took a piano diploma at the Hochschule für Musik Hannover.

She made her Carnegie Hall debut in May 2002 playing her own Suite for Violin, Piano and Orchestra with Gidon Kremer conducting the Kremerata Baltica, and has appeared as a solo pianist at the Moscow Conservatory’s Great Hall, Tokyo Opera City, Lincoln Center, the Herkulessaal, Oslo Konserthus and the Kennedy Center. Her music has been commissioned and played by Kremer, David Finckel and Wu Han, Vadim Gluzman, the Tokyo, Kuss, Parker and Petersen quartets, the SWR and NDR symphony orchestras, the Netherlands Chamber Choir, the RIAS Kammerchor and the Royal Danish Ballet, and at the Lucerne, Lockenhaus, Caramoor, Bremen and Schleswig-Holstein festivals. Her ballet on The Little Mermaid, her second collaboration with the choreographer John Neumeier, was commissioned by the Royal Danish Ballet for the Hans Christian Andersen bicentenary and opened the new Copenhagen Opera House in April 2005. The Double Concerto for violin, piano and orchestra, Op. 40, written in 1997, waited until December 2006 for its premiere in Stuttgart.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lera_Auerbach
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q241503