Leo Ornstein 1892/93–2002

In a life spanning eleven decades, Leo Ornstein came to prominence as a piano virtuoso, particularly of ‘advanced’ modern music, including his own. Having studied at the St Petersburg Conservatory under Glazounov and, following his family’s emigration to the US, at the Julliard School, Ornstein began his career as a pianist, giving the American premieres of works by Debussy, Ravel, Scriabin, Schoenberg, and Bartók. At the same time, his own radical, ‘futurist’ compositions, such as Wild men’s dance, were compared favourably with those of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, so much so that a biography and analysis of his work, by Frederick H. Martens, was written when the composer was still in his twenties. In the late 1920s, however, at the height of a successful concert career, he abruptly ceased performing and set up amusic school in Philadelphia with his wife Pauline Mallet-Prevost, retiring in the mid-1950s. After that he devoted his time entirelyto composing, in a diversity of more conservative styles. His final work, an eighth piano sonata, was composed in 1990, when he was in his late nineties.

Leo Ornstein: born Kremenchug, 2 December 1892 or 1893; died Green Bay, Wisconsin, 24 February 2002.