Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria. His reputation and status as a composer is such that he is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.
Brahms composed for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, and voice and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works. He worked with some of the leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim (the three were close friends). Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire. Brahms, an uncompromising perfectionist, destroyed some of his works and left others unpublished.
Brahms has been considered, by his contemporaries and by later writers, as both a traditionalist and an innovator. His music is firmly rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Classical masters. While many contemporaries found his music too academic, his contribution and craftsmanship have been admired by subsequent figures as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg and Edward Elgar. The diligent, highly constructed nature of Brahms's works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers. Within his meticulous structures is embedded, however, a highly romantic nature.

Born in Stamford, Connecticut in 1970, composer David Bruce grew up in England and now enjoys a growing reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 2013/14 season David was Associate Composer of the San Diego Symphony, for whom he wrote three pieces, including Night Parade for the orchestra's highly successful Carnegie Hall debut in October 2013; and the violin concerto Fragile Light for Gil Shaham for 2014. His fourth Carnegie Hall commission That Time with You (2013) for mezzo-soprano Kelley O'Connor follows Steampunk (2011), Gumboots (2008) and Piosenki (2006), which have all gone on to be widely performed by leading ensembles around the world.
In the UK, David's piece Sidechaining was featured in the 2018 BBC Proms, he was 2012-13 Composer-in-Residence with the Royal Opera House, who co-commissioned with Glyndebourne the opera Nothing (after the book by Janne Teller), which premiered in Glyndebourne in February 2016. Bruce's chamber opera The Firework Maker's Daughter (after the Philip Pullman story) toured the UK and New York in 2013. It was revived for a 27-performance run at ROH Lindbury Studios in December 2015.