This over the pianist became less himself--so far as I had become acquainted with him to this time--than ever. He played a banal barcarole of Rubinstein’s; to be sure he almost made it sound like an interesting composition; he played a scherzino of his own that any one from Schütt to Moszkowski might have signed; he played something of Grieg’s which may have pleased Mr. Finck and two or three ladies in the audience but which certainly left me cold; and he concluded this group with a performance of Liszt’s arrangement of the waltz from Gounod’s _Faust_. Thereupon there was so much applause that he came back and played his scherzino again. His répertoire in this _genre_ was probably too limited to admit of his adding a fresh number.... At this point I arose and left the hall, more in wonder than in indignation. Was this the musician who had been reviled and hissed? Was this the pianist and composer whom Huneker had dubbed the only real futurist in modern music? It was not the Ornstein I myself had heard a few weeks previously striking the keyboards with his fists in the vociferous measures of _The Wild Men’s Dance_; it was not the colour painter of the two _Impressions of Notre Dame_; it was not the Ornstein who in a dark corner of Pogliani’s glowed with glee over the possibility of dividing and redividing the existing scale into eighth, sixteenth, and twenty-fourth tones.... This was another Ornstein and in searching my memory I discovered him to be the oldest Ornstein of all. I remembered five years back when I was assistant to the musical critic of the “New York Times” and had been sent to hear a boy prodigy play on a Sunday evening at the New Amsterdam Theatre. Concerts by serious artists at that period seldom took place outside of recognized concert halls, nor did they occur on Sunday nights. But there was something about this concert that impressed itself upon me and I wrote more than the usual perfunctory notice on this occasion. Here is my account of what I think must have been Leo Ornstein’s first public appearance (March 5, 1911), dug from an old scrap book: “The New Amsterdam Theatre is a strange place for a recital of pianoforte music, but one was held there last evening, when Leo Ornstein, the latest wunderkind to claim metropolitan attention, appeared before a very large audience to contribute his interpretation of a programme which would have tested any fully grown-up talent.