All Laureates

Élisabeth began playing the piano at age five in a household filled with music. She felt an intuitive physical relationship to the keyboard and could play for hours on end. She loved science, literature, and philosophy, but decided at 19 to pursue a career in music.

There wasn’t a strong musical tradition in the family when Carter Johnson grew up in Campbell River, a small town on Vancouver Island. But with encouragement from his grandmother, his parents enrolled him in piano lessons when he was five and Carter fell in love with making music. By age seven, he knew he wanted to be a concert pianist.

Anastasia Vorotnaya recalls having a wild and mischievous childhood growing up in a small city east of Moscow. She rollerbladed with abandon, played football with the boys, and loved roaring up and down a keyboard.