Chopin - Impromptu in A Flat, op. 29

Leo Ornstein, pianist
Columbia A1473 (matrix 38835) recorded May 10, 1913

LEO ORNSTEIN (1895-2002, born Ukraine) was an American experimental composer and pianist of the early twentieth century. His performances of works by avant-garde composers and his own innovative and even shocking pieces made him a cause celebre on both sides of the Atlantic. The bulk of his experimental works were for piano.

Ornstein was the first important composer to make extensive use of the tone cluster As a pianist, he was considered a world-class talent. By the mid-1920s, he had walked away from his fame and soon disappeared from popular memory. Though he gave his last public concert before the age of forty, he continued writing music for another half-century and beyond. Largely forgotten for decades, he was rediscovered in the mid-1970s. Ornstein completed his eighth and final piano sonata in September 1990 at the age of ninety-four, making him the oldest published composer in history at the time (a mark since passed by Elliott Carter).

Ornstein was recognized early on as a prodigy on the piano; in 1902, when Josef Hofmann visited Kremenchuk, he heard the six-year-old Ornstein perform. Hofmann gave him a letter of recommendation to the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Soon after, Ornstein was accepted as a pupil at the Imperial School of Music in Kiev, then headed by Vladimir Puchalsky. A death in the family forced Ornstein's return home. In 1903, Ossip Gabrilowitsch heard him play and recommended him to the Moscow Conservatory. In 1904, the nine-year-old Ornstein auditioned and was accepted. There he studied composition with Glazunov and piano with Anna Yesipova. By the age of eleven, Ornstein was earning his way by coaching opera singers. His family emigrated to the United States on February 24, 1906. They settled in New York’s Lower East Side, and Ornstein enrolled in the Institute of Musical Art—predecessor to the Juilliard School - where he studied piano Bertha Fiering Tapper. In 1911, he made a well-received New York debut with pieces Bach, Beeethoven, Chopin, and Schumann.

Recordings two years later (at the age of eighteen) of works by Chopin, Grieg, and Poldini demonstrate, according to music historian Michael Broyles, "a pianist of sensitivity, prodigious technical ability, and artistic maturity." Two discs were released, this being one of them.