Music runs deep in Lera Auerbach’s maternal family. The composer, conductor, and pianist, born in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 1973, received her first piano lessons from her mother, and switched continents in the early 1990s to study at New York’s Juilliard School of Music. Her compositions, like her refined poetry and artworks, are lean yet richly layered in meaning. The titles she gives to her work, such as “An Old Photograph from the Grandparent’s Childhood” (from Images of Childhood) or I Walk Unseen, invite listeners to set their imaginations free.