Lera Auerbach is an Austrian-American conductor whose work on the podium draws on a distinguished life in composition and concert performance. She brings to the orchestra a composer’s understanding of structure and a pianist’s sensitivity to phrasing, color, and expressive detail. Conducting stands at the center of an artistic life that also encompasses literature and visual art—many forms of one consciousness.

Selected conducting highlights include her appearances with the Stuttgart Philharmonic in Germany and on its Italian tour, in programs pairing Mozart’s Don Giovanni Overture and Piano Concerto in D minor, K. 466, with Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, Pathétique. With the George Enescu Philharmonic, she conducted Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony and performed Mozart’s K. 466 as pianist and conductor. Her work also encompasses large-scale contemporary projects, including the three-and-a-half-hour Demons & Angels production at Wien Modern.

At the 2023 Lera Auerbach Festival in The Hague, she conducted the Residentie Orkest in the Dutch premiere of her Symphony No. 5, Paradise Lost. In November 2026, she conducts MDR orchestral and choral forces in her Symphony No. 4, ARCTICA, as part of Konzerthaus Dortmund’s Zeitinsel festival devoted to her work.

Auerbach’s catalogue comprises more than 180 musical works, spanning symphonies, concertos, operas, ballets, choral scores, chamber music, and solo cycles. Her compositions have been performed by the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic, and Staatskapelle Dresden, among others. Interpreters of her music include Gidon Kremer, Leonidas Kavakos, Hilary Hahn, Daniel Hope, Vadim Gluzman, Gautier Capuçon, Alisa Weilerstein, and Kim Kashkashian.

Her theatrical works include the score for The Little Mermaid, choreographed by John Neumeier and premiered by the Royal Danish Ballet in 2005; Gogol, for which she wrote both music and libretto, premiered at Theater an der Wien in 2011; and The Blind, an a cappella opera for twelve singers. Works such as Russian Requiem, 72 Angels, ARCTICA, and Vessels of Light give musical form to spiritual inquiry, cultural memory, and the relationship between private experience and public history. Her quartets, sonatas, piano trios, and prelude cycles explore these concerns with equal intensity on an intimate scale.

As a pianist, Auerbach maintains a close dialogue between her own compositions and the classical repertoire. She made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2002, performing her Suite for Violin, Piano and Chamber Orchestra with Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica. Creation and interpretation have remained inseparable throughout her musical life.

Born in Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains, Auerbach began writing poetry and making music in childhood. She gave her first public piano performance at six, appeared with orchestra at eight, and composed her first opera at twelve. Her literary work was published before she reached adulthood. In 1991, at seventeen, she decided to remain in New York during an American concert tour. She studied piano and composition at Juilliard, comparative literature at Columbia University, and completed her concert diploma in Hanover. Austria granted her citizenship in 2021 in recognition of her contribution to music and the arts.

Writing in Russian and English, Auerbach has published poetry, prose, aphorisms, essays, and fiction. Her books include Forty Moons, Stairs to Eternity, Hanover Notebook, Excess of Being, Forever Music, and A Is for Oboe: The Orchestra’s Alphabet. Her novel Mirror, published by Virgola Press in 2026, unfolds in twenty-four preludes and twenty-four postludes, bringing musical form to an exploration of childhood, memory, myth, and time.

Her drawings, paintings, and bronze sculptures constitute another substantial body of work. Across page, canvas, and bronze, her imagination combines vulnerability with humor, tenderness with the grotesque, and an enduring fascination with transformation.

Auerbach’s honors include the Hindemith Prize, the Robert Creeley Memorial Award, and a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship. Major institutional portraits have included the 2023 festival in The Hague, Konzerthaus Berlin’s Creative Portrait in 2024/25, and Dortmund’s Zeitinsel in 2026/27. Throughout her work, rigorous craft and imaginative freedom serve a shared purpose: giving form to the complexity of human experience.