Leo Sirota (* 4 May 1885, Kamianets-Podilskyi - † 25 February 1965, USA) was a Jewish pianist virtuoso.
Biographical information
When Syrota was 11 years old, he was already giving lessons to students older than himself and going on concert tours. In Kyiv, he studied with Hryhoriy Khodorovsky.
Ferruccio Busoni was also Syrota's teacher, who facilitated the pianist's debut in Vienna, where they performed Mozart's Sonata in D-dur for two pianos.
In Berlin, Sirota began a concert tour of Europe with the Sergei Koussevitzky Orchestra. Later, Alexander Glazunov became the young musician's teacher.
The repertoire of Leo Sirota includes all works by Mozart, all sonatas by Beethoven, most of the works by Liszt, Schumann, music by Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Busoni, Schoenberg and the pianist's contemporaries.
In 1921-1924, Leo Syrota gave master classes at the Karol Szymanowski Lviv Conservatory. Among his students was the Ukrainian pianist, conductor and composer Antin Rudnytskyi (1902-1975).
On 25 October 1923, in Vienna, Leo Sirota gave birth to his daughter Beata (née Beata Gordon), later an American public figure.
During his tour in Moscow, Leo Sirota received an invitation from the Manchurian government. His performance in Harbin was attended by the leading Japanese composer of the time, Kosaku Yamada. He immediately invited the pianist to perform in Tokyo. Thus, in 1928, Leo Sirota came to Japan for the first time. The pianist's daughter Beata Gordon says:
"When my father returned from this tour, my mother in Vienna was very angry because he had been away for a whole year. She said: "If you go anywhere again, you have to take the whole family with you." And so it was the following year, when he was invited not only to tour Japan, but also to teach at the Imperial Academy for six months."
In 1929, Leo Sirota and his family settled in Japan, where he became the head of the piano department at the Royal Ueno Academy in Tokyo. Instead of the planned six months, the pianist lived in Japan for 17 years.
In 1931, Leo Sirota began teaching piano at the Tokyo Conservatory.
During the Second World War, when his daughter Beata was studying in the United States, he and his wife Augustina lived in a mountain village under house arrest.
In 1946, the couple moved to the United States. Orphan got a job at the St Louis Institute of Music.
Commemoration of the memory
On 25 May 2008, as part of the opening of the VII Kyiv International Documentary Film Festival "Kinolitopys", the world premiere of the film "Leo Sirota's Family and the Twentieth Century", created by Japanese filmmakers (directed by Fujiwara Tomito), took place.
