Best known as an opera conductor, Antonio Pappano expanded his activities into orchestral music in the late '90s. Since 2002, he has been the music director of London's Royal Opera at Covent Garden.

Pappano was born to Italian immigrant parents in Epping, Essex, U.K., on December 30, 1959. His father was a chef who was a tenor singer and a voice teacher on the side. Pappano started piano lessons at age six. After several years, he resolved to make the piano a career. When Pappano was 13, his family moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut, so that his father could take a full-time music teaching job. Pappano took piano lessons with Norma Verrilli and held a variety of jobs that included being a pianist in a cocktail bar. Later, he studied composition with Arnold Franchetti and conducting with Gustav Meier, but at the time, he had no ambition to become a conductor. He became a rehearsal pianist at the New York City Opera and then at the Frankfurt Opera. "The traditional route for conductors is via the piano, working with singers in the opera house. That's how it worked for me," he told the London Independent. Pappano also did rehearsal work with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and there, he attracted the attention of conductor Daniel Barenboim. Barenboim hired Pappano as an assistant, and in 1987, Pappano made his debut at the Norwegian Opera. By 1990, he was the music director there, and in 1992, he was named to the same position at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. He made his recording debut there in 1996, conducting a performance of Mendelssohn's Elijah with the Orchestre Symphonique et Choeurs du Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie.

In 1993, Pappano caught a major break when he subbed for an ailing Christoph von Dohnányi, leading a new Vienna State Opera production of Wagner's Siegfried. Guest conducting appearances at houses in Britain and around Europe followed. Late in the decade, he added orchestral appearances to his résumé, serving from 1997 to 1999 as a guest conductor of the Israel Philharmonic and appearing with the Chicago Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, among many other orchestras. In 2002, Pappano was named the music director of the Royal Opera Covent Garden, a position he held through 2024; Jakub Hrůša was designated his successor, taking up the baton in 2025. In 2005, Pappano also became the music director of the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, continuing to hold that position through the early 2020s. Pappano has a substantial catalog of well over 80 albums, predominantly, but not exclusively, devoted to opera. Pappano has recorded many of the core works of the Italian opera repertory for the EMI Classics label. He also conducts German and French opera enthusiastically, as well as a variety of instrumental music that has included a set of Leonard Bernstein's three symphonies with the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in 2018. In 2020, Pappano conducted a new recording of Verdi's opera Otello, starring Jonas Kaufmann in the title role and, once again, featuring the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. He and that orchestra moved to Warner Classics in 2022 for a recording of Rossini's Messa di Gloria, returning the following year with Puccini's Turandot with Kaufmann in a lead role. ~ James Manheim

Martha Argerich is widely considered one of the greatest pianists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Unusually, her genius reveals itself mostly in collaborations: with orchestras and conductors in concertos, and with chamber musicians.

Of Catalan and Russian Jewish background, Argerich was born in Buenos Aires on June 5, 1941. She started piano lessons at five and made rapid progress, performing concertos by Mozart and Beethoven flawlessly just three years later. Her family moved to Switzerland in 1955, and she studied with Madeleine Lipatti, Nikita Magaloff, and then, for 18 months, with Friedrich Gulda in Vienna after Argentine president Juan Perón arranged for diplomatic work for her family there. Argerich won the Geneva International Competition and the Ferruccio Busoni International Competition in 1957, and she made a well-regarded debut album in 1960, featuring music by Liszt, Prokofiev, Ravel, Brahms, and Chopin. However, her real breakthrough was a first prize at the Chopin International Festival in Warsaw in 1965; she was the first pianist from the Western hemisphere to triumph, and the win brought publicity similar to that which attended Van Cliburn's International Tchaikovsky Competition victory in Moscow in 1958.

After her early years, Argerich rarely gave solo concerts, sometimes saying that she felt lonely on-stage. She recorded concertos, mostly from the late Romantic and early modern periods, with most of the major European conductors. Argerich began a long association with the Deutsche Grammophon label in the 1970s, and her 1975 release featuring concertos by Prokofiev and Ravel, with the Berlin Philharmonic under Claudio Abbado, had an iconic cover photo showing the two in intense conversation. Her 1985 recording of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor, Op. 23, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Charles Dutoit, was another classic. Dutoit was one of Argerich's three husbands; before him came composer Robert Chen, and after him pianist Stephen Kovacevich, and she had children with all three. Argerich recovered from a 1990 bout with malignant melanoma and a 1995 recurrence; she was cured by an experimental treatment at the John Wayne Cancer Institute and performed a Carnegie Hall concert to benefit the Institute. She has continued to give widely praised concerto performances into senior citizenhood, appearing at the BBC Proms in 2016 with conductor Daniel Barenboim in the Liszt Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat major. She has also been an enthusiastic performer of chamber music and duo sonatas, appearing and recording with Kovacevich, pianist Nelson Freire, violinist Gidon Kremer, and other choice players. In her later years, Argerich was widely known for her leadership of the Progetto Martha Argerich at the Lugano Festival in Switzerland, where she performed with and nurtured the careers of many young musicians. That festival came to an end in 2016 after its sponsor was investigated for possible violations of Swiss banking laws, but in 2018, she curated a new festival mounted by the Hamburg Philharmonic, and she has continued to serve as director of the Argerich Music Festival in Beppu, Japan, which she created in 1996. In 2019, she had a busy schedule of concerts across Britain, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany. Her concerts generally take up the mainstream of the concerto and chamber repertory, from Mozart to the early 20th century, but she has performed more contemporary music by her compatriot Alberto Ginastera, Witold Lutoslawski, and others.

Argerich has continued to record for Deutsche Grammophon but has also appeared on Warner, Decca, and other labels. Her recording pace has hardly slowed in her 60s and 70s; in the year 2015 alone, 11 separate Argerich recordings appeared (some were reissues of earlier material). In 2020, Argerich was heard on a new recording of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 19, with conductor Seiji Ozawa and his Mito Chamber Orchestra in Japan. By that time, her catalog included at least 175 recordings. ~ James Manheim