Josef Lhevinne

Josef Lhevinne studied at the Moscow Conservatory under Vasily Safonov, made his public debut at fourteen in a performance conducted by Anton Rubinstein, and graduated top of a class that included both Sergei Rachmaninoff and Alexander Scriabin. Lhevinne is often included as one of the greatest golden-era pianists, and yet, his recorded legacy is approximately fifty minutes of repertoire for Pathé and Victor, albeit treasured and admired. And not unlike a star whose light went out too soon, the public created a mythos based on a small output and clamors for more examples of his playing to further justify his reputation. The wait is now over.

Rosina Bessie was born in Ukraine, the daughter of a Dutch merchant doing business in Kiev. The Czar’s assassination in 1881 unleashed three days of violent anti-Semitic riots, and many Jewish families like the Bessies moved to Moscow. She was a prodigy at the piano and took lessons from a piano student at the Moscow Conservatory, Josef Lhevinne, who was five years older. Later she became a student at that Conservatory and studied with Josef’s teacher, Vassily Safonov. She graduated in 1898 with a gold medal, just as Josef had done in 1892. That same year (1898) she married Josef Lhevinne and he went on to a great international career as a virtuoso pianist. Once when someone heard her and exclaimed that she a better pianist than her husband she was horrified, and vowed from that moment on never to play solo again. She performed only with him as his duo-piano partner until after his death in 1944.

A comprehensive collection of recordings of the music of Johann Strauss, almost all of them come from a Japanese collector, Mayumi Cho, who began collecting all recordings of Johann Strauss' music just after the war. His collection exceeds 700 discs with no fewer than 100 versions of An der schönen blauen Donau.

The Ghost Ship (2CD): The beauty and brilliance of the piano - a double CD of virtuoso and Romantic music by Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Liszt, Skryabin, Dvořák, Saint-Saëns and many more.

Anton Rubinstein was a towering figure of Russian musical life, and one of the 19th century’s most charismatic musical figures. Rivalled at the keyboard only by Liszt, he was near the last in line of pianist-composers that reached a climax with Liszt, Busoni, and Rachmaninov. Like them Rubinstein’s reputation as a composer in his day was more controversial than his reputation as a performer, but unlike them, his vast compositional output, much of it containing music of beauty and originality, still remains relatively unexplored territory. Rubinstein wrote his eight works for piano and orchestra over the last 44 years of his life, with the five concertos dating from 1850–1874.

This disc brings to a conclusion Joseph Banowetz's admirable survey of Rubinstein's complete music for piano and orchestra for Marco Polo. The Fifth Concerto (dating from 1874) is by far the most monumental, both in terms of duration it spans some 46 minutes—and in the virtuosic demands that it places on any pianist brave enough to undertake a performance. Like the Fourth, which was taken into the repertoire of Josef Hofmann the Fifth also found a legendary advocate in Josef Lhevinne, who included it in his sensational American debut concert with Safanov and the Russian Symphony Orchestra in New York in 1906.