Rita McAllister is a composer, pianist, educationalist, and writer on music. She holds a Research Chair at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She was educated at the Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge: her doctoral thesis was on the operas of Sergei Prokofiev. She has published extensively on Prokofiev and on many other aspects of Russian and Soviet music in journals, magazines, and music encyclopedias, and recently re-constructed the first version of Prokofiev's War and Peace, which was premièred in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Rostov-on-Don.
Christina Guillaumier is a musicologist, pianist, and writer on music. She is Head of Undergraduate Programmes at the Royal College of Music (London) and is a member of the Centre for Russian Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. A graduate of the Universities of St Andrews, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and Oxford, her research has been awarded several grants and fellowships. She is a published author on Russian music, including Prokofiev's childhood compositions, his operas, and his early orchestral music.