Vladimir Horowitz

With a liquid touch and extraordinary attention to detail, Vladimir Horowitz is widely admired for his white-hot interpretations of Liszt, Scriabin and Rachmaninoff, among others. Born in 1903 in Kiev, Horowitz fled the then-Russian city in the wake of the 1917 Revolution. After a successful stint giving concerts in Europe, the pianist made his debut at Carnegie Hall in 1928, settling in the U.S. with wife Wanda Toscanini, daughter of conductor Arturo Toscanini. Comprising a major part of Horowitz's legacy are the numerous virtuosic transcriptions (imaginative reworkings of well-known pieces) he composed, such as the 1945 arrangement of Sousa's The Stars and Stripes Forever, which he created to mark the Allied victory in World War II—and his U.S. citizenship. Horowitz's fiendishly difficult transcriptions regularly feature in today's recitals and recordings: Lang Lang often performs the historic pianist's version of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 15 (Ràkòczy March, featured on 2011's Liszt – My Piano Hero) and Yuja Wang plays Horowitz's Variations on a Theme from Bizet's “Carmen” on her 2012 album, Fantasia. Horowitz died in 1989 and is buried in the Toscanini family mausoleum in Milan.