The amazing Leo Ornstein!... I should have written the amazing Leo Ornsteins for “there are many of them and each one of them is one.” Ornstein himself has a symbol for this diversity; some of his music he signs “Vannin.” He has told me that the signature is automatic: when Vannin writes he signs; when Ornstein writes _he_ signs. But it is not alone in composing that there are many Ornsteins; there are many pianists as well. One Ornstein paints his tones with a fine soft brush; the other smears on his colours with a trowel. In his sentimental treatment of triviality he has scarcely a competitor on the serious concert stage (unless it be Fanny Bloomfield-Zeisler). Is this the Caliban, one asks, who conceived and who executes _The Wild Men’s Dance_? The softer Ornstein is less original than his comrade, more imitative.... I have been told that Jews are always imitative in art, that there are no great Jewish composers. Wagner? Well, Wagner was half a Jew, perhaps. Certainly there is imitation in Ornstein, but so was there in the young Beethoven, the young Debussy.... Recently I went to hear Ornstein play under a misconception. I thought that he, with an announced violinist, was going to perform his anarchistic sonata for violin and piano, opus 31. They did perform one of his sonatas but it was an earlier opus, 26, I think. At times, while I listened it seemed to me that nothing so beautiful had been done in this form since César Franck’s sonata. The first movement had a rhapsodic character that was absolutely successful in establishing a mood. The music soared; it did not seem confined at all. It achieved perfectly the effect of improvisation. The second part was even finer, and the scherzo and finale only less good. But this was no new idiom. I looked again and again at my programme; again and again at the man on the piano stool. Was this not Harold Bauer playing Ravel?... One theme struck me as astonishingly like Johnson’s air in the last act of _The Girl of the Golden West_. There was a good use made of the whole-tone scale and its attendant harmonies, which sounded strangely in our ears a few seasons past, and a ravishing series of figurations and runs made one remember that Debussy had described falling water in a similar fashion.