Leonard Shure

LEONARD SHURE, internationally acclaimed American concert pianist, heir to the tradition of the great Artur Schnabel, began his career as a performer at the age of 6 and as a teenager went to Germany to study privately with Schnabel. Shure graduated from the Hochschule fur Musik in Berlin in 1927, at which time he made his debut in Germany and served as Schnabel's first and only assistant until 1933. Throughout this period he also performed extensively in Europe. Shure returned to the United States in 1933 and made his first concert appearance in New York with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitsky conducting. Leonard Shure was a featured soloist with virtually every major symphony orchestra in the United States, including the New York Philharmonic, the Detroit, St. Louis, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras, and on numerous occasions, with the Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of George Szell. In 1941 Shure became the first pianist to perform at the Berkshire Music Festival in Tanglewood, when he appeared there with Dr. Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He also performed with such eminent conductors as William Steinberg, Leonard Bernstein and Dimitri Mitropoulos. In 1979 Shure made a successful tour of the Soviet Union. A distinguished pedagogue as well as concert artist, Leonard Shure taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music, the University of Texas, Boston University, and the Mannes School of Music in New York. In the summers of 1966 and 1967, Mr. Shure gave the first applied music courses ever offered at Harvard University. He spent two summers at the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem, and four summers in Aspen, Colorado. Late in life, Shure was a member of the faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music.