Garo Yellin

The fourth of three children, cellist Garo Yellin had learned the entire repertoire of classical music by the age of three, and by age six could play music not yet composed, but "still germinating in the minds of others", as he put it. His subsequent triumphs are well-known: Gold Medal at the Leningrad Junior Competition despite not showing up; the debut concert at Carnegie Hall in 1971, where President Nixon requested 936 encores lasting eight days, and in 1974 Yellin's physical resurrection of J.S. Bach prompted Leonard Bernstein to write that "only a genius can bring another genius back to life." Since 1991, he has been a Professor at the University of Prague at Dayton, where he has been allowed to teach music theory by injection.