Leonard Borwick

Leonard Borwick (26 February 1868 – 15 September 1925) was an English concert pianist especially associated with the music of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. Early training and debuts Born in Walthamstow, Essex, of a Staffordshire family, Leonard Borwick studied piano under Henry R. Bird, and violin and viola under Alfred Gibson until the age of 16. He then went to study piano under Clara Schumann at the Hoch Conservatory, Frankfurt, and also composition under Bernhard Scholz and Iwan Knorr, and violin and viola under Fritz Basserman. During the later 1880s, while on leave from Clara Schumann's school, Borwick had met the baritone Harry Plunket Greene while playing one evening at Arthur Chappell's house in London. Greene had been at Clifton College with Borwick's brother, and a friendship grew up between them. He made his debut at the Museum concerts in Frankfurt in Beethoven's "Emperor" concerto in November 1889, and in the same month at Strasbourg under the direction of Franz Stockhausen (a pupil of Alkan) in that concerto and with pieces by Chopin (a Nocturne) and Liszt (the Paganini Études). London debut and recitals 1890–1891 His London debut was on 8 May 1890, at a Royal Philharmonic Society concert, in Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor. He performed it again in London on 12 June, and on 17 June in a concert for Hans Richter he played a Brahms Rhapsody, sharing the platform with Marie Fillunger (1850–1930), lieder singer and intimate of the Schumann-Joachim circle. He also played the Brahms D minor concerto, which George Bernard Shaw called 'a hash of bits and scraps with plenty of thickening in the pianoforte part, which Mr Leonard Borwick played with the enthusiasm of youth in a style technically admirable'. Shaw recommended that he should embark on recitals. On 20 September he performed a piano quartet of Brahms, and in November 1890 he performed both the quartet, and the Die Junge Nonne and Nacht und Traume with Fillunger, at Windsor for a royal concert. He has been described as 'Queen Victoria's favourite pianist'. By December, Shaw described him as 'a finished pupil ... his quick musical feeling and diligently-earned technical accomplishment entitle him to take his place with credit among our foremost concert-players'. In March 1891 he played a Bach concerto for two pianos with Ilona Eibenschütz (a Clara Schumann pupil) at a Bach Choir concert.