Russian composer Lera Auerbach, born 1973 in Chelyabinsk, a prominent city in the Ural Mountains bordering Siberia. She started to play the piano at a very early age and gave her first public performance when she was only six years old. She was twelve years old when she composed an opera. In 1991, as the winner of several competitions, Lera Auerbach was invited to undertake a concert tour of the USA. She decided to remain in America, becoming one of the last artists to defect from the Soviet Union. She attended the Juilliard School in New York, from which she graduated with degrees in both piano and composition. She also graduated from the prestigious soloist programme at the Hochschule für Musik in Hannover in Germany, and has studied comparative literature at Columbia University. Her piano teachers include Einar Steen-Nøkleberg, Nina Svetlanova and Joseph Kalichstein, and she has studied composition under Milton Babbitt and Robert Beaser.