Ethel Leginska

Ethel Leginska

Ethel Leginska (actually Ethel Liggins ; born April 13, 1886 in Hull ; † February 26, 1970 in Los Angeles ) was an English pianist, conductor and composer.

Life

Ethel Liggins performed publicly as a pianist at the age of six and made her debut at London's Queen's Hall at the age of ten . She then studied in Frankfurt am Main with James Kwast and in Vienna for three years with Theodor Leschetizky . On the advice of the singer Lady Maud Warrender , she adopted the Slavic-sounding name Leginska. After successful tours through Europe, she went to the USA in 1913 , where she made her debut in New York's Aeolian Hall and was soon touted as "the Paderewski of women pianists" by the New York Herald Tribune .

In addition to her successful career as a concert pianist, Leginska took composition lessons from Rubin Goldmark and Ernest Bloch since 1914 ; her first publicly performed work was a string quartet, followed by the symphonic poem Beyond the Fields We Know .

In 1923 Leginska went to London to study orchestral conducting with Eugène Aynsley Goossens . The following year she worked with Robert Heger , the conductor of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, and conducted a performance of her orchestral suite Quatre sujets barbaren .

In 1925 she made her debut as a conductor in the USA with the New York Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall . In the same year she became the first woman to conduct the Hollywood Bowl . She then went to Boston, where she founded the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and in 1926 the Women's Symphony Orchestra of Boston , with which she toured twice until its dissolution in 1930.

In 1932 Leginska founded a second women's orchestra in New York, the National Women's Symphony Orchestra . She lived in London and Paris in the late 1930s before settling in Los Angeles in 1939. There she founded the concert agency New Ventures in Music and worked as a piano teacher. Her students included James Fields , Daniel Pollack and Bruce Sutherland .

Leginska has received a series of recordings with works by Schubert , Chopin , Liszt and Rachmaninow on the Columbia Records label , which were newly released as CDs in 2002 by Ivory Classics .

Works

• String Quartet
• Beyond the Fields We Know , symphonic poetry
• Quatre sujets barbaren , Suite, 1924
• Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra , 1925
• Gale , Opera, 1935
• The Rose and the Ring , Opera, 1957

literature

• Marguerite Broadbent, Terry Broadbent: Leginska: Forgotten Genius of Music. North West Player Piano Association, Wilmslow 2002, ISBN 0-9525101-4-6 .