Rosina Lhevinne

Rosina Yakovlevna Lhevinne (née Bessie; March 29, 1880, Kyiv – November 9, 1976, Glendale, California) was a Russian and American pianist and music teacher. She was the daughter of the wealthy jeweler Yakov Bessier (Bessie) and Maria Katz.

She studied piano privately; one of her teachers was Iosif Levin, then a student at the Moscow Conservatory. In 1898 she graduated from the conservatory with a gold medal after studying with Vasily Safonov, and she married Iosif Levin.

Lhevinne toured as a pianist in Vienna (1910), Saint Petersburg (1911), and Berlin (1912). From 1914 to 1919 she lived in Berlin with her husband, and in 1919 they moved to New York, where Iosif Levin taught at the Juilliard School and Rosina assisted him.

She performed in ensemble with her husband, specializing in repertoire for two pianos. After Iosif Levin’s death, Juilliard leadership persuaded her to succeed him, and over the following years her class produced a number of prominent pianists. In her later years she occasionally returned to the concert stage and made several recordings.

In January 1963, at the age of 82, she made her debut with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein, performing Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1—the same concerto she had played at her 1898 conservatory graduation examination.

Among Lhevinne’s notable students were Van Cliburn, Ralph Votapek, Garrick Ohlsson, Eduard Auer, James Levine, Ursula Oppens, John Williams, and Santos Ojeda.

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