For many musicians and music lovers, every day is Bach’s birthday. The great 20th-century cellist and musical luminary, Pablo Casals celebrated Bach every day of his adult life.

Our endless fascination with Mozart reflects the impact this incredible artist made in his short 35-year life. While Mozart was not revolutionary in the way that Beethoven would be in the years following Mozart’s death, Mozart’s compositional models were groundbreaking nonetheless.

Jean Françaix was a prodigious talent born to a musical family. His mother was a singer and his father was the director of the Le Mans Conservatory.

Frédéric Chopin was born in 1810 in Żelazowa Wola, a suburb of Warsaw. Six months after his birth, Chopin’s father, Nicholas, took a job teaching French at the Warsaw Lyceum in the Saxon Palace and the family relocated to Warsaw. Chopin’s mother played and taught piano and probably gave Chopin his initial instruction on the instrument.

The concert opens with Alberto Ginastera’s String Quartet No. 1, Op. 20, from 1948. Ginastera, universally acclaimed as Argentina’s greatest composer, was born in Buenos Aires in 1916 and died in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1983. As a composer and an educator, Ginastera initially held a strong commitment to galvanizing an Argentinian musical identity. However, ongoing political and artistic conflicts with oppressive ruling regimes gradually caused him to spend the latter part of his life in the United States and Europe.