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niyad

(112,424 posts)
Sat Apr 13, 2013, 08:38 PM Apr 2013

a biography of the day-ethel leginska (pianist, composer, conductor, pioneer for women in music)

Ethel Leginska

Ethel Leginska née Liggins (13 April 1886 – 26 February 1970) was a British pianist, music teacher, composer and conductor. She was a pioneer of women's opportunity in music performance and conducting.[1]


Ethel Liggins was born in Hull, Yorkshire, England. With support from a wealthy patron, she studied in Frankfurt, Berlin and Vienna in 1900 with Theodor Leschetizky and James Kwast, and was performing in Europe under the stage name Ethel Leginska by 1906. She married American Roy Emerson Whittern in 1907 and had one son, but the couple divorced in 1918 and Leginska resumed her career, making her American debut in New York in 1913. After an unsuccessful custody fight for her son, she became outspoken about inadequate opportunities for women.

She ended her performing career in 1926 and turned to conducting and composing. She had been working as a conductor since the early twenties, using her status as a performer to book engagements as a guest conductor of European orchestras by promising to play as soloist. In 1925 she conducted the New York Symphony Orchestra, and continued to find engagements in American cities including Boston and Los Angeles. She established the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and the Boston English Opera Company, founded the National Women's Symphony Orchestra in New York and served as director of the Chicago Women's Symphony Orchestra. In 1940 Leginska moved to Los Angeles where she set up a studio and taught music. She died in Los Angeles in 1970

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethel_Leginska



Leginska: Forgotten Genius of Music
The Story of a Great Musician
by Marguerite and Terry Broadbent

Ethel Leginska, one of the most talented musicians of the 20th century, was born plain 'Ethel Liggins' in Hull in 1886, but took the name 'Leginska' on the advice of Lady Maud Warrender, in an era when the best top-class musicians had Polish- or Russian-sounding names. After making her London debut at Queen's Hall at the age of ten, she studied in Frankfurt and later with the great Leschetizky in Vienna. She then made successful tours of Europe as a concert pianist before going to the USA where she immediately enjoyed huge success and was dubbed 'The Paderewski of Women Pianists'. Later she composed music, and then established for herself a pioneering role as a conductor in an era when women conductors were a rarity. This culminated in the founding by Leginska in the late 1920s of her own women's orchestras. She also composed three operas and in 1935 was the first woman to conduct her own opera in a major opera house, one of several notable 'firsts' achieved by this indomitable, pioneering musician. In 1939 Leginska settled in Los Angeles where, as a piano teacher, she built up a large circle of talented students, continuing in this role right up to her death in 1970.
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http://www.leginska.org/leginska.html



England's Ethel Leginska (1886-1970) enjoyed an acclaimed career as a concert pianist for many years; in the 1920s she became the first woman to regularly appear as a conductor with some of the world's top orchestras. Leginska left behind a small body of musical works she wrote for the symphony and string quartet, as well as two operas. Many "were performed by major organizations at a time when women's compositions rarely received such recognition," according Leginska's profile in Notable American Women: The Modern Period.

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Not surprisingly, Leginska often spoke publicly about the challenges faced by the few professional women of the time, especially regarding child care. She also urged women to move forward and break down artificial barriers. She was already doing so herself by writing her own compositions, which she began around 1914. To further her knowledge, she studied composition with Rubin Goldmark and Ernest Bloch, and the first of her works to be performed publicly was String Quartet, inspired by four poems by an Indian poet, which premiered in Boston in April of 1921. A symphonic poem with a title borrowed from a tale by Irish fantasy-fiction pioneer Lord Dunsany, Beyond the Fields We Know, made its debut in New York City the following February. The critics treated these performances of Leginska's work as somewhat of a novelty, however.

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Formed Groundbreaking Women's Orchestras

Consulting with doctors, Leginska was counseled to take a year off from performing and duly announced her official retirement from the concert stage as a solo pianist. She wrote her last symphonic work, Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra, which made its premiere on January 3, 1926, in New York. She had settled in Boston in 1925 and there founded the hundred-member Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, which was a mostly male group that offered accessible ticket prices to classical-music lovers for one short season. She then established the Women's Symphony Orchestra of Boston in 1926. It toured twice before it folded in 1930. In December of 1928 she conducted a National Opera Company performance of Rigoletto at the Boston Opera House. Her determination to conduct - when it was unheard of for a woman to do so at the time-ignited a media debate; detractors argued that women did not possess the intellectual rigors to handle the complexities of the job.

Leaving Boston for Europe in 1930, Leginska conducted performances of opera companies there and returned to New York City in 1931 to lead an orchestra for a Broadway revival of Franz von Suppe's Boccaccio. The following year, she founded another short-lived group, the National Women's Symphony Orchestra, in New York. An opera she wrote, Gale, made its debut at the Chicago City Opera on November 23, 1935, with Leginska at the podium. She found fewer opportunities to lead orchestras, however, and turned to teaching to support herself. Living in London and Paris in during the late 1930s, she had some notable students there, and in 1939 settled in Los Angeles. Again, she enjoyed a reputation as an esteemed instructor in her field, and her students of note from this later part of her career included James Fields, Daniel Pollack, and Bruce Sutherland. She also established a concert bureau, New Ventures in Music, with many of her students on its roster. A second opera, The Rose and the Ring, had its debut in Los Angeles in 1957, again with Leginska leading the orchestra. It would be the last of her works to debut before an audience.
It was not until late 1950s that women conductors began to make progress within classical circles: Leginska's true heir at the podium was American Sarah Caldwell and her Opera Company of Boston. Some years later, Caldwell became the first woman ever to conduct at the New York Metropolitan Opera House in a 1976 engagement. Leginska died in Los Angeles of a stroke on February 26, 1970, at the age of 83. Despite her pioneering forays into composition and conducting, Leginska remained devoted to her first love. "For me the piano is capable of reflecting every mood, every feeling; all pathos, joy, sorrow - the good and the evil too - all there is in life, all that one has lived," she told Brower in the Piano Mastery interview. She made some recordings for the Columbia label in the mid-1920s and in 2002 these were re-issued on Ivory in the compact-disc format. Of its Four Impromptus by Schubert, the Chopin Polonaise, two Rachmaninoff Preludes, and Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody, American Record Guide critic Harold C. Schonberg found that the tracks "reveal a superior musical mind coupled to an unerring technique.

http://www.answers.com/topic/ethel-leginska
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