Howard's ability to recall anything by ear, and perfect pitch, was first cited in Melbourne newspaper The Herald,[2] when he was 5 years old.

He attended Monash University[3] in Melbourne to study English, but by the end of his first year had been invited to lecture the post-graduate students on advanced counterpoint and theory.

He was a founding member of the now disbanded London Beethoven Trio, which gave regular performances for a number of years.

Four discs were given to Liszt's seventeen works for piano and orchestra, about half of which were premiere recordings made from unpublished manuscripts.

A critic in the BBC Music Magazine declared: "Howard is, by general consensus, the finest living exponent of Liszt.

In 2000 he was awarded the Pro Cultura Hungarica Medal and Citation by the Hungarian Government, a rare honour for a non-Hungarian.

[5] Howard is also active as a composer, and has written an opera (based on the Norse tale "Hreidar the Fool", with lyrics by Phillip Carrington and John Gough), a marimba concerto, chamber music, and many piano pieces.

In 1997 Howard was commissioned by Gramophone magazine to compose and record a short piano piece ("Yuletide Pastorale") for its Christmas Competition: a CD was given away with the magazine, and readers were asked to state in which composer's style the piece was written, and to identify the seven well-known Christmas melodies concealed within it.

Ne andrò lontana" from the opera La Wally by Alfredo Catalani, and a Concert Fantasy for Piano on themes from Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta Ruddigore.

Howard's facility in completing unfinished works has resulted in commissions as diverse as a new realisation of Bach's The Musical Offering, which he orchestrated and conducted in Finland in 1990, and completions of works by composers such as Mozart (String Quartet movement, K. 464a), Scriabin (Sonata in E-flat minor: end of the slow movement, and a 3-bar hole in the finale), Shostakovich (Piano Trio No.

In 2003, Boosey & Hawkes published Howard's "New Corrected Edition" of the 2-piano score of Rachmaninoff's 4th Piano Concerto (in collaboration with Robert Threlfall).

In addition to his Liszt project, Leslie Howard's recordings include works by Balakirev, Bax, Beethoven, Borodin, Bridge, Rosemary Brown, Bruckner, Busoni, Chopin, Rebecca Helferich Clarke, Diabelli, Franck, Ignaz Friedman, Gade, Gershwin, Glazunov, Grainger, Granados, Grieg, Mendelssohn, Moszkowski, Mozart, Franz Xaver Mozart, Palmgren, Poulenc, Rachmaninoff, Raff, Reger, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rossini, Anton Rubinstein, Schumann, Sibelius, Smetana, Stravinsky, Tausig, Tchaikovsky, Vaughan Williams and Wagner.

[8] It has been suggested that this removal was connected to a 2007 traffic incident in the UK, which led to Howard being banned from driving for three years, given a six-month suspended jail sentence, and ordered to carry out 80 hours' unpaid work and to pay the equivalent of $2,100 costs.