Leo Podolsky; Noted Pianist and Teacher

Leo Podolsky, a concert pianist, musicologist and veteran teacher whose performing career dated to an era when seats in Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium could be purchased for 25 cents, is dead at age 96.

His death Oct. 1 at Glendale Hospital of congestive heart failure was reported this week by his longtime associate, June Davison.

A frequent visitor to Los Angeles stages when he was concertizing in the 1920s and ‘30s, Podolsky came to Southern California permanently in 1983 after the death of his wife.

Before that he had taught for 58 years at the Sherwood School in Chicago and before that he traveled the world, saying that he had made 113 sea voyages and performed 423 concerts in the Orient alone.

In Burbank, his modest home was turned into a museum of his souvenirs. They included intricate tapestries and carvings from the Far East, a rare portrait of Beethoven playing the violin and pictures of a young Bruno Walter and Vladimir Horowitz.

But his prize possession, which will be donated to the USC School of Music along with his other treasures, is an 1886 death mask of composer Franz Liszt.

The Russian-born Podolsky remained active late in life, performing in an occasional concert and recently recording 12 new piano rolls for Amico Co., which said he was the last surviving member of a 1926-30 catalogue that included Sergei Rachmaninoff and Leo Ornstein.

At his request, there was no funeral.