In forum discussions of who possessed the finest piano technique on recording, the Russian-American pianist Josef Lhévinne (1874–1944) is likely to have a few apologists. Because of both Lhévinne’s legendary status and his small discography, the serious pianophile should listen to all of his recordings carefully at least once, beginning with his magnificently orchestrated realization of Adolf Schulz-Evler’s arrangement of Johann Strauss’s instantly recognizable waltz The Blue Danube. Listening to this interpretation alongside a good performance of the orchestral original (e.g., Carlos Kleiber’s with the Vienna Philharmonic) makes for an enlightening comparison indeed. After this recording, first listening preference in Lhévinne’s discography should be given to his Chopin recordings as well as the two-piano Mozart collaborations with his wife Rosina.

Solo Interpretation (13/20)

For a pianist who is held in such high esteem by cognoscenti, Josef Lhévinne recorded little, even by comparison with other great artists from the pre-high-fi days of yore such as Ignaz Friedman, Josef Hofmann, and Moriz Rosenthal. The sparseness of his recorded legacy is perhaps partly attributable to his uncompromising perfectionism, coupled with a diffident personality that lacked the chutzpah of a more aggressively self-promoting performer like Vladimir Horowitz or Arthur Rubinstein. In addition, Lhévinne’s career as a soloist was sometimes overshadowed by his reputation as a pedagogue with a long-standing teaching position at the Juilliard School alongside his wife Rosina. (Among the Lhévinnes’ more notable students were Van Cliburn, Adele Marcus, and John Browning.) Nowadays even some of his more devoted admirers seem to forget that Lhévinne was also once a traveling concert artist with a hectic touring schedule.

The Chopin Recordings

The handful of Chopin pieces Lhévinne recorded were staples of his programs. His performance of the Polish master’s devilishly tricky etude in thirds (Op. 25, No. 6) is particularly celebrated among old-school piano aficionados and justly so: it may tend toward metronomic rigidity at times, but it remains a nonpareil for its finesse, lightness, and polish, taking on a will-o’-the-wisp quality in Lhévinne’s hands. (David Saperton’s version is the only one I’ve heard that rivals Lhévinne’s technically or musically.) On the other hand, I find that Lhévinne’s somewhat puritanical rendering of Chopin’s equally technically treacherous B-flat minor prelude (Op. 28, No. 16) doesn’t quite live up to its sacrosanct reputation. To be sure, the evenness of Lhévinne’s scale passagework is unsurpassed, but his circumspect temperament seems at odds with the piece’s demonic energy, and he appears unable to convey the desperate race for survival Chopin might have imagined. In short, even on their sloppiest days, I’d take Alfred Cortot or Vladimir Sofronitsky on this demonically intense prelude in a heartbeat over this rather unemotionally involved interpretation. Lhévinne’s “Winter Wind” and “Octave”etudes also tend to fall flat for me on an interpretive level. I acknowledge his irreproachable technical control, yet I miss a sense of tempestuousness. Likewise, his recording of the Chopin Heroic Polonaise is snappy rhythmically but musically timid, lacking the masculine swagger of an Ignaz Friedman, Samson François, or William Kapell. And in the A-flat major prelude (Op. 28, No. 17)—probably his weakest Chopin recording—Lhévinne sounds as if he’s trapped in a trench of ennui: he sings the top notes effectively enough in the right hand, but there’s little sense of dancing or whimsy in his phrasing (this subtle waltz of a prelude is admittedly extremely elusive from an interpretive standpoint). On a brighter note, a sleeper Chopin performance of Lhévinne’s is his sweetly phrased etude in E-flat, Op. 10, No. 11 (one of my personal favorites), an angelic song without words consisting of widely spaced rolled chords strummed in a harplike manner and ascending to a capricious melody played by the weak fingers of the right hand in the piano’s higher reaches. This piece’s nacreous surface polish seems to inspire Lhévinne, as exhibited in his use of a more liquid rubato than usual.

Interestingly, in addition to his studio recordings for RCA Victor that have been circulating for years on disc and online, Lhévinne recorded alternative versions of a few of his Chopin staples during various radio hour broadcasts in the 1930s (these were officially released in 2020 by Marston Records for the first time). While most of these live performances regrettably fail to distinguish themselves much from their studio counterparts, the one notable exception is the Winter Wind etude recorded as part of the Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour broadcast in October 1935. Lhévinne seems to break out of his shell in this version, even daring to knock out a few clunkers, and the result is a more exciting, crisper, and better-balanced execution of this etude compared with his studio take. (In particular, he sings the bass melody more convincingly.) His November 1935 Magic Key broadcast rendition of the Op. 53 polonaise is perhaps slightly preferable to the studio version as well, especially the remarkable litheness and precision in the drumroll-thunder bass octaves of the middle section, though I still think his rather dainty touch, restrained rhythm, and clipped staccato don’t jibe well with the work’s titular heroic aspect.

Romantic Transcriptions et al.

Besides his Chopin, which accounts for fully half of his tiny discography, Lhévinne recorded mostly Romantic-era transcriptions. The highlight of these is his iconic recording of Adolf Schulz-Evler’s arrangement of themes from Johann Strauss’s “The Blue Danube,” which deserves every one of the accolades heaped upon it over the years. In this herculean demonstration of pianistic tonal color, technical wizardry meets rarefied elegance in equal measure. From the graceful yet robust “invitation to the dance” of the introductory measures to the jaw-droppingly crisp leaps of the octaves in the bravura coda, this is exactly what a virtuoso Strauss piano transcription should sound like. My prescription for anyone who’s having a bad day is to bathe your ears in this river’s glass-limpid waters. Equally fantastic in every sense of the word are Lhévinne’s elfin-light flutterings on Robert Schumann’s “Frühlingsnacht” (transcribed by Franz Liszt from No. 12 of the composer’s song cycle Liederkreis), which shimmers with nocturnal, pixie-ish magic. His recording of the Beethoven écossaises is scarcely less charming, though I’m not sure why the transcriber of the version Lhévinne plays here, namely the early-modern-era Italian piano guru Ferruccio Busoni, felt the need to soup these bumptious dance baubles up: the originals are just as convincing, and the extra frills and doublings tend to cheapen their earnest simplicity (one might speak in a similar vein of Busoni’s transcription of the first Liszt Mephisto Waltz). The sound quality is also noticeably scratchier on this recording than it is on some others, given its particularly ancient date, as is also the case with Lhévinne’s version of Schumann’s “Der Kontrabandiste” (transcribed by Karl Tausig), which is laudably precise but could do with more gypsy-ish abandon in the grand manner.

Piano Rolls: An Unhappy Medium

It’s worth mentioning that in addition to his acoustic recordings for Pathé and RCA Victor, Lhévinne—like Rachmaninov—made a number of piano-roll recordings for the American Piano Company (Ampico). (In fact, these slightly outnumber his acoustic recordings.) Among these is a well-known rendition of Schumann’s Papillons as well as another version of the Blue Danube transcription (the latter of which incidentally contains the work’s brief anacrustic introduction that Lhévinne omits from his acoustic recording). However, such roll recordings are not considered here. Some have argued that these reproductions capture the performer’s original style well, but I respectfully disagree. Artificial is always going to be, well, artificial. A pianist’s “personality” goes hand in hand with how he uses acoustics, and I’ve always found these roll recordings robotic-sounding. 

Pity that Lhévinne didn’t make more acoustic recordings so we could get a better picture of his repertoire and style. Unlikely though it may be at this point, one can only hope some brave spelunker unearths a few more of his forgotten gems from the archives someday.

Collaborations (6/10)

Until recently, the only extant ensemble recordings of Lhévinne’s were his two-piano performances of the Mozart D Major sonata (K. 448) and Debussy’s “Fêtes” (Ravel’s transcription) with his wife Rosina. Marston’s 2020 box set unveiled a few additional goodies, including a performance of Mozart’s relatively early piano concerto in F Major (K. 242) arranged for two pianos (also with Rosina), a couple of incomplete renditions of the Tchaikovsky first piano concerto, and the Brahms first piano quartet.

Two-Piano Recordings With Rosina Lhévinne

The Lhévinnes’ Mozart recordings are as exquisite as they come, coupling jewel-like surface polish with both bite and sensuousness, a rare combination in interpretations of this composer’s works. Lhévinne has a cool reservation to his personality that suits the aloof aspect of Mozart’s music well, and Rosina complements her husband’s introversion with her fiery, dominant temperament (it’s pretty clear who wore the pants in this marriage). Their ensemble is mostly spot-on accurate, but even more impressive is their supreme lightness of attack, which is ethereal but never fluffy. Occasionally, they do tend to shift their momentum forward (e.g., in the slow movements of both the sonata and the concerto, which are slightly too hasty for my taste), but this is a small complaint. In the F major concerto, John Barbirolli (an underrated English conductor who accompanied many fine soloists of the day, also including Hofmann and Horowitz) directs the performance in his typically unassuming manner, never drowning out the leggiero playing of the soloists. With bristling intensity and seamless delivery without any hint of struggle or gaucheness, the Lhévinnes here deliver two of the finest Mozart piano performances one is likely to hear on this earth.

Sadly, the only other work the Lhévinnes recorded as a team was Maurice Ravel’s excellent transcription of one of Claude Debussy’s nocturnes for orchestra, the “Fêtes” (No. 2). Ostensibly this seems a strange repertory choice for the pair, since such a raucous depiction of revelry at a provincial festival doesn’t mesh too well with their more inward-turned sensibilities. Indeed, the performance is uptight at times, lacking the Bacchic extroversion Debussy might have been striving for. Nevertheless, the Lhévinnes do deserve plaudits for their command over orchestration, ensemble, and rhythm in this magnificently effective transcription that is too rarely performed given the relative dearth of great four-hand music.

Sole Surviving Chamber Performance

The robustly textured music of Brahms may be even less conducive to Lhévinne’s svelte keyboard style. Yet his one known recorded collaboration as pianist in a string ensemble was in that composer’s first piano quartet during a radio broadcast alongside members of the Perolé Quartet, an esteemed group from the earlier part of the 20th century. I find that the string playing is good, but not remarkable, conveying a certain earnestness but not the expressive depth of the best Brahms performances. Lhévinne, too, gets bogged down in details, and his approach can be overly dry at times. The performance has its moments, though, especially the galloping finale: in this barging conclusion, it’s as if the caffeine rush from morning coffee set in.

Broadcast Performances of Tchaikovsky First Concerto

Besides the Mozart F Major concerto with Rosina, Lhévinne’s only extant concerto collaborations are two performances of the Tchaikovsky first concerto, one with Rosario Bourdon and the NBC Concert Orchestra (a radio broadcast) and the other with Albert Stoessel at the Worcester Music Festival in Massachusetts (a private recording that Marston has released for the first time). Because the entire first movement (by far the longest and most important) is missing from the Bourdon version, only the one with Stoessel is considered here (and even still, the first 100 or so measures of the first movement are missing). Lhévinne’s effort in this warhorse of the piano concerto literature has a few surprises—especially the fierce accenting and terraced dynamics in some of the faster sections of the first movement—but it generally lacks the dynamism of the best interpretations, such as those by Vladimir Horowitz (with Arturo Toscanini and Bruno Walter), Emil Gilels (with Fritz Reiner), or Géza Anda (with Alceo Galliera). The last movement in particular needs a shot of adrenaline, lacking the requisite percussiveness of attack. He also seems a bit embarrassed by some of the more lyrical sections, such as those in the sentimental second movement. All in all, it’s an uneven performance in which Lhévinne seems to snap awake for the portions of the work that interest him, then lapse back into a coma when he becomes bored. Still, there’s just enough freshness to put this rendition on one’s list of marginally likable performances of this hackneyed concerto, especially given all the more recent bloated snorefests from the likes of Andrei Gavrilov or Evgeny Kissin.

Despite some of the flaws of the ensemble additions to Lhévinne’s discography, high praise is due to Ward Marston for both tracking down and sprucing up the sound (which most likely would have been unlistenable otherwise) of these never-before-released collaborations—especially the Mozart F major concerto with Rosina. Listening to them gives us a bit more insight into the musicianship of one of the more penumbral pianists of the past.

Technique (10/10)

From a technical standpoint, Lhévinne was in a class by himself, even in an age in which he shared the limelight with other giants of the great Russian piano tradition. The only other pianists in recorded history who come to my mind as rivaling Lhévinne technically are Rachmaninov, Saperton, and Hofmann, but not even any of them could quite match Lhévinne’s uncanny fluidity or his command over touch, tempo, and evenness. Whether it’s his nearly flawless scales in the Chopin B-flat minor prelude; his preternaturally light, elastic, and fleet octaves in the Heroic Polonaise or the Strauss-Schulz-Evler “Blue Danube” transcription; or the firmness and evenness of his double notes in Schumann’s fiendishly difficult toccata, Lhévinne’s technical execution was textbook. On Rachmaninov’s G minor prelude, even the composer himself can’t quite vie with the ultra-precise rebound of Lhévinne’s wrists. And the glistening lucidity, easy speed, and general souplesse of his Chopin thirds etude should so depress any conservatory students planning to perform it in public that they hurl themselves in front of a speeding dump truck before daring to do so. Indeed, Lhévinne is also known to have performed selections from Carl Czerny’s School of Velocity and Art of Finger Dexterity for his students at Juilliard and to have left them agape at his control in extreme tempos (especially on the modern piano, since these pieces were written for a much lighter Viennese-action instrument).  

Yet all this obsession with technique comes at a price, and Lhévinne’s meticulous practicing routines, in which he honed the minutest details of his repertory standbys, could not help but drain his performances of some of their spontaneity. To be fair, whether one cottons to Lhévinne’s extra-polished style may be a matter of temperament. Unlike a “romantic” artist like Cortot, who viewed technique as more of a means to an end, Lhévinne was a true classicist who seemed to revel in technique for its own sake and employed it in an attempt to reach the summit of aesthetic beauty. To analogize to several admittedly more “creative” arts, Lhévinne may be to piano playing what Jane Austen was to literature, Raphael was to painting, or Robert Bresson was to filmmaking. While these artists can come across as emotionally cool on the surface, repeated readings, viewings, or listenings, respectively, can reveal great subtleties at the work’s core. The same is true of Lhévinne, a refreshingly humble artist who, though he may not have blazed new trails in piano playing, had such a well-oiled mechanism that he was able to bring to light details that had never been heard before.

Versatility (1/5)

An assessment of Lhévinne in this area is hampered by the incomplete picture his small discography gives of his actual repertoire. Like many virtuoso pianists of his generation, he presumably performed very little Bach, Mozart, or Haydn after his conservatory days, though hearing his sublime four-hand Mozart recordings with Rosina (see “Collaborations” section above) made me wonder why he wouldn’t have branched out more often from his usual Romantic-era fare and recorded a solo sonata of this composer as well. Even Beethoven, the earliest composer with whom most golden-age pianists are associated, doesn’t appear to receive much mention in discussions about Lhevinne (though, like most of his colleagues, he doubtless had many Beethoven sonatas “performance-ready,” not to mention that he is known to have played the mighty Emperor concerto under the baton of the legendary Russian virtuoso and St. Petersburg Conservatory founder Anton Rubinstein).

Lhévinne seems to have carefully cultivated his repertory selections to showcase his supreme technical skill rather than a particular aesthetic vision. Despite his hyper-polishing of a few Chopin etudes and preludes, it’s hard for me to imagine his achieving great success with one of that composer’s mazurkas, ballades, or scherzos. And his Rachmaninov G minor prelude lacks a folkish Russian flavor such as that in Sviatoslav Richter’s or the composer’s own interpretation. In his notes for the disc jacket of the Marston release, classical music librarian and academician Jonathan Summers notes that Lhévinne’s repertory also included such weighty pieces as Brahms’s Paganini variations and Schumann’s Carnaval and Symphonic Etudes, all of which are among the most difficult works from the standard piano literature. I’d be curious to see how Lhévinne would fare with such larger-scale structures; however, if his clinical reading of the Tchaikovsky first concerto is any indication, I’m not sure it’s a great disappointment that he didn’t end up recording them. 

Legacy (4/5)

Given the hallowed reputation of Lhévinne’s recordings among pianophiles, I suspect that they will be readily available on the Internet for years to come as well as on CD to the extent that physical media survive the digital revolution. Before Marston’s release, the meat of Lhévinne’s discography was available in one disc on the Naxos “Great Pianists” series and often still is on both Amazon and eBay. Although my inclination has sometimes been to describe these recordings as overrated alongside those of some lesser-known contemporary artists like Rosenthal, they are still a must-have for the shelves, literal or digital, of any serious collector.