Educational Media Reviews Online

Spending an hour with this video gives viewers an appreciative introduction to master pianist and teacher Rosina Lhevinne’s long adult life (her dates are 1880-1976), especially as a teacher at Juilliard. As a performer born in the Ukraine and trained at the Moscow conservatory, she had a small but highly regarded two-piano career with her husband Josef Lhevinne, who had a major solo career until his death from a sudden heart attack in 1944. Rosina taught with him at Juilliard and elsewhere, but she came into her own as a teacher and soloist after becoming a widow. Using both still and motion pictures, taped interviews with both colleagues (such as Artur Rubinstein) and former students (including Van Cliburn, Mischa Dichter, and John Williams), and recordings of her own playing, this video skillfully demonstrates Mme. Lhevinne’s teaching techniques and philosophy, as well as her own late-nineteenth-century “Russian-tradition” playing style. Tributes to her abound, but there is also some mention of her problems, especially with occasional bouts of depression.

This film has been in production for a long time (Rubinstein died in 1982), and was assembled with great care. Its utilization of older audio and video material enriches it, and helpful subtitles in English appear when people for whom English was not a mother tongue speak with heavy accents.

The legacy of any teacher is what resides in her students, and this video certainly emphasizes Mme. Lhevinne’s remarkable late-life emergence as one of the most important piano pedagogues of the mid-twentieth century. Today’s historians of piano music can appreciate her achievement, and students of women in music should find her life’s work of interest.