Alexander Isaakovich Cherkassky, known as Shura, was born in Odessa on 24 September 1909 into a Jewish family that fled to the United States after the Russian Revolution. His first lessons came from his mother Lydia, who had once played for Tchaikovsky in Saint Petersburg; in America he auditioned for Rachmaninoff, who told him to stop performing for two years and change his hand position, and then studied at the Curtis Institute with Josef Hofmann, who told him to keep playing in public and to practise four hours a day. He kept to the four hours for the rest of his life. He died in London on 27 December 1995, aged eighty-six.

He moved to California in the 1940s, appeared at the Hollywood Bowl under Barbirolli and Stokowski, and recorded Beethoven’s Appassionata for the soundtrack of the 1946 Bette Davis film Deception; a Hamburg performance of Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody under Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt in 1949 established him in Germany and Austria, and a Wigmore Hall recital on 27 March 1957 did the same in Britain, where he settled in 1961 and lived in a London hotel until his death. His performing career ran for over seventy years and his repertoire from the baroque to Berio, but he refused a fixed reading of anything: some conductors avoided him because nothing agreed in rehearsal was guaranteed in the concert. Many of his best recordings are live, and wide recognition came only in his last decades.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shura_Cherkassky
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q713428