Eugene List (July 6, 1918March 1, 1985) was an American concert pianist and teacher. Early life Eugene List was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He spent his formative years in Los Angeles, where his father Louis List (originally Lisnitzer) was a language teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District and his mother, Rose, a pharmacist. Louis Lisnitzer had immigrated to America from Odessa, Ukraine and settled in Philadelphia, where he met and married Rose, whose family had also come from the same region. In 1937, Louis decided officially to change his name and that of his family to "List". The family soon relocated to California. Showing early musical talent, young Eugene studied with Julius V. Seyler who soon proclaimed him a prodigy. His striking musical gifts were obvious. In 1929, at the age of 12, he performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Artur Rodziński, playing Beethoven's 3rd Piano Concerto. Rodziński recommended that he go to Philadelphia to study with the renowned teacher Olga Samaroff. In 1932 she accepted young List with great enthusiasm. Too young for the Juilliard School, List first studied at the Philadelphia Conservatory under Samaroff's tutelage, transferring a few years later to Juilliard in New York. During his second year with Madam Samaroff at Philadelphia (1934), List entered and won Philadelphia's annual piano competition, giving him the opportunity to perform with Philadelphia's celebrated orchestra. Although he had planned to perform the Schumann Piano Concerto in A minor, List was given the most stunning challenge of his career. Six weeks before the scheduled concert, Leopold Stokowski asked him to play the premiere of Piano Concerto No. 1 by Dmitri Shostakovich that he had just received from the Soviet Union. List accepted the challenge and learned the new concerto within the six-week time frame. Concert career At the age of sixteen, Eugene List's official concert career began in December 1934 at Philadelphia's Academy of Music. Although under great stress, he delivered a dazzling performance and received rave reviews. He was declared the wunderkind and a mature artist almost immediately. List's performance as the young American who met Stokowski's challenge established him as a star, a status that would stay with him the rest of his fifty-year career. As the only pianist in America who knew Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 1, he received many more invitations to appear with major orchestras in the US, including the New York Philharmonic