Leo Sirota was a Russian, Japanese and American virtuoso pianist. He was born into a Jewish family in Kamianets-Podilskyi on May 4, 1885. By the age of 11, he was giving lessons to older students and touring in concerts. In Kyiv, he studied with Grigory Khodorovsky. Ferruccio Busoni also taught him and helped arrange his debut in Vienna, where they performed Mozart’s sonata for two pianos. Sirota later began a European concert tour with Serge Koussevitzky’s orchestra in Berlin, and Alexander Glazunov became another of his teachers.
Sirota’s repertoire included all of Mozart’s works and Beethoven’s sonatas, as well as much of the music of Liszt and Schumann and works by Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Busoni, Schoenberg and his contemporaries. From 1921 to 1924, he gave master classes at the Lviv Conservatory named after Karol Szymanowski.
After performing in Moscow, Sirota was invited to Manchuria. The Japanese composer Kosaku Yamada heard him perform in Harbin and invited him to Tokyo. Sirota first visited Japan in 1928. The following year, he moved there with his family and headed the piano department at Ueno Royal Academy in Tokyo. He stayed in Japan for 17 years, rather than the six months originally planned, and from 1931 also taught piano at the Tokyo Conservatory. His students included Minoru Matsuya, Takahiro Sonoda, Haruko Fujita and Alexei Abaza.
In 1946, Sirota and his wife moved to the United States, where he took a position at the Institute of Music in St. Louis. He died on February 25, 1965.