In 2023 the Trust created an award ‘in memory of Ilona Eibenschütz’ to support the studies of a postgraduate student of piano at the Royal College of Music.

Ilona Eibenschütz (1871 – 1967) was a distinguished late-19th century concert pianist. She was Clara Schumann’s last pupil and a friend of Brahms, and, following her marriage, spent her later life in London, where she was known to the Trust’s Founder, Dr Anderson. The award was made possible by the recent private sale of the Steinway grand piano that formerly belonged to Ilona Eibenschütz, and on which her last recordings were made.

Ilona Eibenschütz. This image is made available via Wikimedia Commons (here) under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

The current holder of the award, for the 2025-6 academic year, is Charles Roberts who is in the first year of his Master’s degree.

22-year-old American pianist Charles Roberts started piano at the late age of 10, and was accepted into Shenandoah Conservatory in Winchester, VA at age 14. Roberts studied with John O’Conor at The Glenn Gould School of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto for his bachelor’s in performance and is currently a master’s student at the Royal College of Music in London studying under Prof. Dmitri Alexeev.

Roberts won first prize in the Mary Graham Lasley Concerto Competition in Alexandria, VA in March 2025. He was also the highest ranked American pianist in the 69th Maria Canals International Piano Competition in Barcelona, Spain in April 2024. In October 2023, Roberts created a chamber orchestra made up of students from The Glenn Gould School and The University of Toronto, directing and organizing a sold-out concert featuring Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, with himself as soloist.

Roberts was the pianist with the Shenandoah Conservatory Symphony Orchestra from 2017 – 2021 and the Royal Conservatory Orchestra from 2021-2025. He was featured as a soloist at age 14 with Shenandoah’s orchestra at the Middleburg Film Festival in Virginia.

A member of the R2DUO, an internationally acclaimed father-son, saxophone-piano duo with Timothy Roberts, Roberts performs concerts and recitals across the United States and Europe, including Paris, Strasbourg, Amsterdam, Seville, and Dallas, TX. His European premiere was at age 14 in Paris as part of the R2DUO.

Previous Holder

The first holder of the Eibenschütz Award, for the academic years 2023-4 and 2024-5 was Louis-Victor Bak.

©The Musician’s Photographer

Born in France, Louis-Victor Bak is a solo and chamber music pianist. After starting the piano at the age of fourteen, following seven years of flute studies, Louis-Victor was taught by Chrystel Saussac at the Conservatoire de Lyon (CRR), and Laurent Boullet in Berlin. He moved to London in 2019 to study at the Royal College of Music with Edna Stern. In 2023, he graduated with a Bachelor of Music and is now pursuing his studies for a Master of Performance under the guidance of Edna Stern and Vanessa Latarche.

In 2023 the Trust provided Louis-Victor with a grant to assist with the costs of recording his debut album Debussy – chaminade from the ‘Hawkins Special Fund‘.

You can follow Louis-Victor’s progress via his website, here.

For more on the various other ways in which the Trust supports students and scholars, please see here.