47 LGBT classical musicians

Thomas Adès is a British composer, pianist and conductor. Five compositions by Adès received votes in the 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000: The Tempest (2004), Violin Concerto (2005), Tevot (2007), In Seven Days (2008), and Polaris (2010).

Samuel Osmond Barber II was an American composer of orchestral, opera, choral, and piano music. He is one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century; music critic Donal Henahan stated, "Probably no other American composer has ever enjoyed such early, such persistent and such long-lasting acclaim."

Iain Bell is an English composer whose output is predominantly of vocal works, namely opera, art song or orchestral song.

Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners, also known as Gerald Tyrwhitt, was a British composer, novelist, painter and aesthete. He is usually referred to as Lord Berners.

Leonard Bernstein was an American composer, conductor, pianist, music educator, author, and lifelong humanitarian. He was one of the most significant American cultural personalities of the 20th century. According to music critic Donal Henahan, he was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history".

Marcus Samuel Blitzstein, was an American composer, lyricist, and librettist. He won national attention in 1937 when his pro-union musical The Cradle Will Rock, directed by Orson Welles, was shut down by the Works Progress Administration. He is known for The Cradle Will Rock and for his Off-Broadway translation/adaptation of The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. His works also include the opera Regina, an adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes; the Broadway musical Juno, based on Seán O'Casey's play Juno and the Paycock; and No for an Answer. He completed translation/adaptations of Brecht's and Weill's musical play Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and of Brecht's play Mother Courage and Her Children with music by Paul Dessau. Blitzstein also composed music for films, such as Surf and Seaweed (1931) and The Spanish Earth (1937), and he contributed two songs to the original 1960 production of Hellman's play Toys in the Attic.

Henriëtte Hilda Bosmans was a Dutch composer.

Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. His best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes (1945), the War Requiem (1962) and the orchestral showpiece The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1945).

Stuart David Challender, AO was an Australian conductor, known particularly for his work with The Australian Opera, Elizabethan Sydney Orchestra and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

William Lincoln Christie is an American-born French conductor and harpsichordist. He is a specialist in baroque repertoire and is the founder of the ensemble Les Arts Florissants.

Harvey Lavan "Van" Cliburn Jr. was an American pianist who, at the age of 23, achieved worldwide recognition when he won the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 . Cliburn's mother, a piano teacher and an accomplished pianist in her own right, discovered him playing at age three, mimicking one of her students and arranged for him to start taking lessons. Cliburn developed a rich, round tone and a singing-voice-like phrasing, having been taught from the start to sing each piece.

Fiora Corradetti Contino was an American opera conductor and teacher. She was particularly known for her interpretations of Italian verismo works of the late 19th century, and was described as one of the most important figures in opera of the 20th century. Anne Midgette of The New York Times once suggested that she "might have had a far bigger career had she been a man".

Aaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later a conductor of his own and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as "the Dean of American Composers". The open, slowly changing harmonies in much of his music are typical of what many people consider to be the sound of American music, evoking the vast American landscape and pioneer spirit. He is best known for the works he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s in a deliberately accessible style often referred to as "populist" and which the composer labeled his "vernacular" style. Works in this vein include the ballets Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid and Rodeo, his Fanfare for the Common Man and Third Symphony. In addition to his ballets and orchestral works, he produced music in many other genres, including chamber music, vocal works, opera and film scores.

Youri Aleksandrovich Egorov was a Soviet and Monegasque classical pianist.

Bülent Ersoy is a Turkish singer and actress. A trans woman, she is known as one of the most popular singers of Turkish music, nicknamed Diva by her fans. Ersoy has many famous hits such as "Geceler" (Nights), "Beddua" (Curse), "Maazallah" (God Forbid!), "Biz Ayrılamayız" (We Cannot Break Up), "Sefam Olsun" (I Enjoy Myself), and "Bir Tanrıyı Bir de Beni Sakın Unutma". Ersoy has published more than thirty albums so far and has made a name for herself in Turkish music history.

Reynaldo Hahn was a Venezuelan-born French composer, conductor, music critic, and singer. He is best known for his songs – mélodies – of which he wrote more than 100.

Lou Silver Harrison was an American composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell, and Arnold Schoenberg. He worked with noted Javanese Gamelan musician K. P. H. Notoprojo.

Hans Werner Henze was a German composer. His large oeuvre of works is extremely varied in style, having been influenced by serialism, atonality, Stravinsky, Italian music, Arabic music and jazz, as well as traditional schools of German composition. In particular, his stage works reflect "his consistent cultivation of music for the theatre throughout his life".

Christopher Jarvis Haley Hogwood was an English conductor, harpsichordist, writer, and musicologist. Founder of the early music ensemble the Academy of Ancient Music, he was an authority on historically informed performance and a leading figure in the early music revival of the late 20th century.

Vladimir Samoylovich Horowitz was a Russian-born American classical pianist and composer, who lived most of his life in the United States. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest pianists of all time. He was acclaimed for his virtuoso technique, his tone color, and the excitement that was engendered by his playing.

Stephen Andrew Gill Hough, CBE (; born 22 November 1961) is a British-born classical pianist, composer and writer. He became an Australian citizen in 2005 and thus has dual nationality.

Sharon Isbin is a multiple Grammy Award winning American classical guitarist and the founding director of the guitar department at the Juilliard School.

Geoffrey Lancaster AM is an Australian classical pianist and conductor. Born in Sydney, he was raised in Dubbo, New South Wales before moving to Canberra. He attended the Canberra School of Music where he studied piano with Larry Sitsky. He also studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, graduating with a Doctor of Philosophy, and also completed a master's degree at the University of Tasmania. In 1984, he moved to Amsterdam to study fortepiano with Stanley Hoogland at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. In 1996 he was a professor at the Royal College of Music in London, following which he worked at the School of Music at the University of Western Australia. He was a professor of the ANU School of Music from 2000 until 2012. Now based in Perth, he is Professor of the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University.

John Arthur Lanchbery OBE was an English-Australian composer and conductor, famous for his ballet arrangements. He served as the Principal Conductor of the Royal Ballet from 1959 to 1972, Principal Conductor of the Australian Ballet from 1972 to 1977, and Musical Director of the American Ballet Theatre from 1978 to 1980. Although he resigned from the position of Principal Conductor of the Royal Ballet in 1972, he continued to conduct regularly for the Company until 2001.

Wanda Aleksandra Landowska was a Polish harpsichordist and pianist whose performances, teaching, writings and especially her many recordings played a large role in reviving the popularity of the harpsichord in the early 20th century. She was the first person to record Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations on the harpsichord in 1933. She became a naturalized French citizen in 1938.

Colin Carhart McPhee was a Canadian composer and musicologist. He is best known for being the first Western composer to make an ethnomusicological study of Bali, and for the quality of that work. He also composed music influenced by that of Bali and Java decades before such compositions that were based on world music became widespread.

Dimitri Mitropoulos was a Greek conductor, pianist, and composer. He received international fame both as a major conductor and composer of the 20th century.

Michael Morgan is an American conductor. He is currently music director of the Oakland East Bay Symphony and the Sacramento Philharmonic Orchestra, and artistic director of Festival Opera in Walnut Creek, California. In 2012, he was named music director of Bear Valley Music Festival.

Nico Asher Muhly is an American contemporary classical music composer and arranger who has worked and recorded with both classical and pop musicians. He is a member of the Icelandic music collective/recording label Bedroom Community.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, CC is a Canadian (Québécois) conductor and pianist. He is currently music director of the Orchestre Métropolitain (Montréal), the Metropolitan Opera, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He was also principal conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra from 2008 to 2018.

Garrick Olof Ohlsson is an American classical pianist. He is the only American to win first prize in the International Frédéric Chopin Piano Competition, in 1970. He also won first prize at the Busoni Competition in Italy and the Montreal Piano Competition in Canada. He was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize in 1994 and received the 1998 University Musical Society Distinguished Artist Award in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ohlsson has also been nominated for three Grammy Awards, winning one in 2008.

Pauline Oliveros was an American composer, accordionist and a central figure in the development of post-war experimental and electronic music.

Our Lady J is an American classical pianist, television writer, and singer-songwriter. She is a writer and producer for the television series Transparent and Pose.

Harry Partch was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of musical instruments. He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and was one of the first 20th-century composers in the West to work systematically with microtonal scales. He built custom-made instruments in these tunings on which to play his compositions, and described his theory and practice in his book Genesis of a Music (1947).

Sir Peter Neville Luard Pears was an English tenor. His career was closely associated with the composer Benjamin Britten, his personal and professional partner for nearly forty years.

Tobias Picker is an American composer and pianist noted for his orchestral works Old and Lost Rivers and The Encantadas, his operas Emmeline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Thérèse Raquin and Dolores Claiborne, and his ballet Awakenings, among many other works.

Alan Emanuel Pierson is an American conductor. His parents are Elaine Pierson and Edward S. Pierson, the latter an engineering professor at Purdue University Calumet. In Chicago Pierson took piano and composition lessons at the People's Music School, graduating high school at Francis W. Parker. Pierson is a 1996 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with degrees in music and physics. At MIT, he was a timpanist and an assistant conductor with the MIT Symphony Orchestra, and also a composer.

Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc was a French composer and pianist. His compositions include songs, solo piano works, chamber music, choral pieces, operas, ballets, and orchestral concert music. Among the best-known are the piano suite Trois mouvements perpétuels (1919), the ballet Les biches (1923), the Concert champêtre (1928) for harpsichord and orchestra, the Organ Concerto (1938), the opera Dialogues des Carmélites (1957), and the Gloria (1959) for soprano, choir and orchestra.

Stephen Joshua Sondheim is an American composer and lyricist known for his work in musical theatre. One of the most important figures in 20th-century musical theatre, Sondheim has been praised for having “reinvented the American musical" with shows that tackle "unexpected themes that range far beyond the [genre's] traditional subjects" with "music and lyrics of unprecedented complexity and sophistication." His shows have been acclaimed for addressing "darker, more harrowing elements of the human experience," with songs often tinged with "ambivalence" about various aspects of life.

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was an English composer, music critic, pianist and writer whose musical output spanned eight decades and ranges from sets of miniatures to works lasting several hours. One of the most prolific 20th-century composers, he is best known for nocturnes such as Gulistān and Villa Tasca, and for his large-scale compositions, which include seven symphonies for piano solo, four toccatas, Sequentia cyclica and 100 Transcendental Studies.

Sanford Sylvan was an American baritone.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally. He was honored in 1884 by Tsar Alexander III and awarded a lifetime pension.

Michael Tilson Thomas is an American conductor, pianist and composer. He is currently the artistic director of the New World Symphony, an American orchestral academy based in Miami Beach, Florida. He is also Music Director Laureate of the San Francisco Symphony and Conductor Laureate of the London Symphony Orchestra.

Sir Michael Kemp Tippett was an English composer who rose to prominence during and immediately after the Second World War. In his lifetime he was sometimes ranked with his contemporary Benjamin Britten as one of the leading British composers of the 20th century. Among his best-known works are the oratorio A Child of Our Time, the orchestral Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, and the opera The Midsummer Marriage.

Lorraine "Tui" St. George Tucker was an American microtonal composer and recorder player and instrument developer.

Šimon Voseček is an Austrian-Czech composer. He is known for his opera "Biedermann und die Brandstifter".

Siegfried Helferich Richard Wagner was a German composer and conductor, the son of Richard Wagner. He was an opera composer and the artistic director of the Bayreuth Festival from 1908 to 1930.