Elisabeth Leonskaja plays an all-Schubert recital at Wigmore Hall on Tuesday 22 September 2026, inside the Autumn International Piano Festival.
Elisabeth Leonskaja was born in Tbilisi in 1945 to parents who had fled Odesa during the war, won the Enescu Competition in Bucharest at eighteen, and went on to the Moscow Conservatory. There she met Sviatoslav Richter, who played duets with her and remained a close friend for the rest of his life — a lineage that puts her about as near the Russian grand tradition as anyone still performing. She left the Soviet Union in 1978 and has lived in Vienna since.
Schubert is where she has concentrated. The late sonatas in particular have been the work of decades for her, and she plays them the way musicians who knew Richter tend to: slowly enough to let the harmony do its own work, without the nervous forward pressure that makes the long movements sound like they need cutting. Austria, which took her in when she left, has given her its Cross of Honour for Science and Art, first class.
She plays at Wigmore Hall on Tuesday 22 September 2026. At eighty she is one of the last direct links to a school of playing that formed in Moscow in the 1960s, and the hall’s small room is the right size for it — a Schubert sonata is chamber music that happens to need only one person. The hall has had her back most seasons for thirty years.