Leonard Borwick
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.
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'.
Brahms himself was at this concert, and wrote to Clara Schumann that her pupil's playing had contained all the fire and passion and technical ability the composer had hoped for in his most sanguine moments.
Shaw found him blameless but unmemorable: perhaps it was overshadowed by the English premiere of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony, which Sir Alexander Mackenzie conducted on the same occasion.
However, Borwick's warmth and colour were appreciated by the Philharmonic, who asked him back repeatedly, and Herman Klein felt that at last the dry days of Arabella Goddard and her feux d'artifice were at an end.
A Chopin B flat minor Sonata given in June was received with large enthusiasm at St James's Hall, together with works of Saint-Saëns, Schumann, Liszt and Mendelssohn.
In July 1894 he gave two London solo evenings with Emily Shinner and Marie Fillunger at the Queen's Hall in recital of works by Brahms and Schumann.
On 11 January 1895 Borwick and Plunket Greene gave the first complete performance of Schumann's Dichterliebe ever heard in England, at St James' Hall.
The friendship always remained, but the routine of the recitals and tours, which had to be fitted around separate English, continental and transatlantic engagements, was dissolved around 1904 rather than continue less than wholeheartedly.
In March 1914 the Philharmonic Society heard him play the Schumann concerto under Willem Mengelberg: and in an Appassionata Sonata delivered in Edinburgh in 1913, and in his November 1914 Carnegie Hall recital (which included Bruyères, the first English performance of any of the Debussy Preludes from Book II), seemed to promise much: 'a freedom and vigour which gave his art a new force'.
After the war, in May 1919 he and the violinist Jelly d'Arányi gave a memorial sonata concert at the Wigmore Hall for the Irish-Australian musician Frederick Septimus Kelly, an Oxford graduate killed in 1916.
In 1921 he gave two recitals in the Aeolian Hall in March and April, which included his transcription of Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (originally premiered for him by Mark Hambourg).
He is remembered as a poet of the keyboard, a great painter of pianistic colours, who possessed a very broad range of expression from the most delicate touch to a fire and resource of tonal depth greater than that usually associated with the Clara Schumann school.
