TINA LERNER (ODESSA, JUNE 5, 1889 — DIED
AFTER 1947)
Valentina
Osipovna Lerner was the daughter of Yiddish writers Osip Mikhailovich Lerner
and Mariam Rabinovitch. She showed musical promise from an early age, in her
birthplace, Odessa. She studied at Moscow Conservatory and with Leopold
Godowsky, and began performing while still a teenager. Lerner performed in
Germany and England before she toured North America in 1908 and 1909,
performing with orchestras in major cities, starting in New York with a concert
at Carnegie Hall. She returned to perform in London in 1912, before embarking
on her third American tour (1912-1913). “An audience that represented the
wealth and culture of San Francisco went into ecstasies of delight over her
remarkable playing of the Tschaikowski Concerto,” according to the San Francisco
Orchestra’s manager, Frank W. Healy. Her fifth American tour commenced in 1917.
She toured in South America in 1922. In 1917, she was one of the first pianists
to give a concert over a radio telephone, when she played aboard a steamship in
the Pacific Ocean in a concert that was transmitted to other steamships between
San Francisco and Honolulu, on the occasion of George Washington’s birthday.
Her performances of works by Chopin and Tchaikovsky were captured on piano
rolls. She lived in Syracuse, New York in the 1920s, and taught piano master
classes at Syracuse University. Shavitch and Lerner gave a concert together at
the Hollywood Bowl in 1927. Tina Lerner married twice, both times to musicians.
She married Luis Bachner in 1909 and divorced him in 1915. She married
conductor Vladimir Shavitch in 1915, a few days after her first marriage was
officially ended. The Shavitches had a daughter, Dollina, born in 1916. Tina
Lerner was widowed when Vladimir Shavitch died in 1947; she was living in
Florence, Italy, with their daughter by then. Tina Lerner’s grave is in the
Cimitero Monumentale della Misericordia at Antella, near Florence.
TRACKLIST
5979 DUO-ART
SCHUMANN-TAUSIG -El Contrabandista (The Smuggler) Op. 85, No. 6
6213 DUO-ART
LISZT – Concerto Pathétique. Arranged for Two Pianos (w. Shavitz)
6854 AMPICO
CHOPIN – Etude, Op. 10, No. 4, c
6946 AMPICO
CHOPIN – Ballade No. l, Op. 23, g
7038 AMPICO
CHOPIN – Andante spianato & Grande Polonaise, Op. 22, Eb
7072 AMPICO CHOPIN – Tarantelle, Op. 43, a

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