Garrick Ohlsson was born April 3, 1948, in White Plains, N.Y., he began his piano studies at the Westchester Conservatory of Music, later entering The Juilliard School, in New York City. As a student of Claudio Arrau, he has established himself as a master of the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, though he performs the entirety of the piano repertoire extending into the 21st century, as well as pieces commissioned for himself. Ohlsson was awarded the First prizes at the 1966 Busoni Competition in Italy and the 1968 Montréal Piano Competition, in addition to being the winner of the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition, for which he remains the only American winner. He is a founding member of the FOG Trio with violinist Jorja Fleezanis and cellist Michael Grebanier.

In 1994 Ohlsson was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize and in 1998 he received the University Musical Society Distinguished Artist Award in Ann Arbor, MI. In 2008 he re-released his 16-disc set of the Complete Works of Chopin followed in 2010 by a complete set of the Brahms piano variations. In 2011 he was honoured with a Grammy award for his recording of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto.  Mr Ohlsson was featured in the documentary The Art of Chopin in recognition of the Chopin bicentenary in 2010 and was the 2014 recipient of the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance from the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music. The artist currently resides in San Francisco, California.

Alexander Scriabin composed ten piano sonatas that are staples of the repertoire, with the Fifth Piano Sonata being the most popular. Scriabin's hundreds of preludes, études and poems are considered masterpieces of the 20th century. Scriabin's style transformed enormously as he matured. His early work is romantic and accessible, while his later compositions explore the reaches of harmony. Scholars have hypothesized that if Scriabin had lived longer, he would have preceded the Austrian school of serialism and Moscow would have become the centre of atonality. Upon Scriabin's sudden death, his friend and classmate, Sergei Rachmaninoff, toured Russia in a series of all-Scriabin recitals for the first time performing music other than his own. At that time, Scriabin was known as a pianist and Rachmaninoff was considered only as a composer.

Alixandra Porembski, English Language Annotator