Rosina Lhévinne

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Rosina Lhévinne (born Rosina Bessie, March 29, 1880 in Kiev, Russia (now Ukraine) - November 9, 1976 in Glendale, California), Russian pianist and piano pedagogue.

Rosina Bessie was the daughter of a prosperous jeweler and began piano lessons at age 6 with a local teacher in Moscow where the family had moved in the years following her birth. When the teacher became ill, a family friend suggested that she continue her studies with a talented student from the Moscow Imperial Conservatory, Josef Lhevinne, who was 5 years her senior. Several years later Rosina was admitted to the Conservatory herself where, in 1898, she won the Gold Medal in piano and immediately after graduating married Josef Lhevinne. With Josef's career as a concert pianist already well underway, Rosina vowed that she would confine her activities to teaching and performing on two pianos secondary to her husband - a vow she kept until Josef Lhevinne's death in 1944.

Having acted essentially as a preparatory teacher to her more famous husband's students for 46 years, she felt unprepared at his death to assume his full duties at the Juilliard School in New York where they had emigrated in 1919. Nevertheless, the Juilliard School's administrators were unanimous in wanting her in a prominent position on the piano faculty there, and in the 32 years remaining to her before her death in 1976 at age 96, a remarkable array of talent was nurtured in her studio. Among Madame Lhevinne's students were Van Cliburn, who, in becoming the first American to win the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958 at the height of the Cold War, became an instant worldwide celebrity. Other Lhevinne students include James Levine, Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Boston Symphony, noted film composer John Williams, pianists John Browning, Tong Il Han (the one Boston University fired because of sexual herassment and now he is back to Korea), Martin Canin, Daniel Pollack, Mischa Dichter, Jeaneanne Dowis and many others.

Fortunately, some years after her husband died, Madame Lhevinne revised her decision never to play in public as a soloist, and in her 70s and 80s she made a remarkable series of appearances first in collaboration with the Juilliard String Quartet and then in several concertos at the Aspen Summer Music Festival. Her greatest moment as a soloist came in January 1963 at age 82 with her debut at the New York Philharmonic under conductor Leonard Bernstein playing the Chopin Piano Concerto No. 1, a piece she had performed for her graduation from the Moscow Conservatory sixty-five years earlier. There are recordings of both the Chopin Concerto and Mozart's C Major Concerto, K. 467. In her playing one can hear all that exemplifies the best of the Russian school: beautiful golden tone, effortless technique, exquisite legato and a natural freedom in phrasing.

In 2003, her former student and assistant Salome Ramras Arkatov produced a documentary film called The Legacy of Rosina Lhevinne containing a good deal of archival footage of Madame Lhevinne teaching and performing. For further information, Robert K. Wallace's 1976 book about the Lhevinnes, A Century of Music-Making: The Lives of Josef and Rosina Lhevinne is also excellent.