Leo Sirota

GEDCOM Note

Leo SIROTA

Born in Kiev, Sirota received most of his training from Busoni in Vienna. He worked as rehearsal pianist with the conductor Horenstein, whose sister he married.

Sirota had an extraordinary Vienna debut: with Busoni they performed Mozart's Sonata in D for Two Pianos and the Busoni Piano Concerto, Sirota as soloist with Busoni conducting. Then Sirota played the Liszt Don Juan Fantasy . His repertoire was seemingly limitless and he played chamber music a great deal.

Sirota settled in Japan in 1928 and it is due to him that most pianists from Japan received such good training. After the Second World War he moved to America and quietly taught in St. Louis. Miraculously he was asked by a local radio station to perform practically each week: this writer discovered nearly 40 hours of broadcast tapes in his daughter's closet.

Sirota had a remarkably clear mind and presented each work with its appropriate style, well-defined structure and sensitivity to its poetic and dramatic content. While his Apollonian reserve created a solid base in each work, his incredible physical and emotional strength had the endurance to do justice to works as varied as Bach's Chromatic Fantasy & Fuge, all Beethoven's Sonatas, the complete works of Chopin, much of Liszt and Schumann, Russian masters such as Tchaikovsky, Rubinstein, Glazounov and to give the world premiere of Stravinsky's Three Scenes from Petrushka. To this day his recording of Petrushka is unmatched.

He also enjoyed maintaining an extraordinarily polsihed technique, playing such works as the Chopin Minute Waltz arranged by Rosenthal with the right hand in thirds, a feat his friend Artur Rubinstein marvelled at, as he could not play it anywhere near Sirota's tempo. Sirota kept abreast of new music: one of his final projects, before his death in 1965, was to coach the blind koto player Kimio Eto in learning Henry Cowell's Concerto for Koto and Orchestra. Busoni dedicated his arrangement and paraphrase of Mozart's Gigue, the Giga, Variazione e Bolero , to Sirota

'a9 Allan Evans, 1996

http://www.arbiterrecords.com/musicresourcecenter/sirota.html