The Nightingale's Sonata

April 15, 2019
Biography of a Jewish girl who transcended poverty and prejudice to become an illustrious violin virtuoso. Flautist Wolf (Musical Gifts or How a Maine Fishing Village Became a Center for Great Music, 2011, etc.), co-founder of Bay Chamber Concerts and former executive director of the New England Foundation for the Arts, grew up hearing tales about his famous grandmother, Lea Luboshutz (1885-1965). Those tales--some incomplete, some contradicted by other family members' versions of events--piqued the author's curiosity. Urged by his mother to "tell the story," he mined boxes of letters and clippings, archival documents, diaries, memoirs, and histories to convey, in a sensitive, perceptive biography, the improbable truth about Luboshutz and her emergence from a tumultuous world. She grew up in Odessa, where Jews were forced to live. Her father, certain that she was a musical prodigy, began violin lessons when she was 4; at the age of 5, she was performing for neighbors and at school. At 8, she won a scholarship for private lessons with a prominent teacher; at 14, she entered the Moscow Conservatory, invited by an influential musician who heard her play in Odessa. Luboshutz's career, Wolf discovered, was punctuated by "amazing good fortune" in the form of generous patrons who provided money and support, not only to her, but also family members. Among them, none was as significant as Onissim Goldovsky, a brilliant pianist, lawyer, and writer, "a true Renaissance man" who, at the time he met 18-year-old Luboshutz, was 38 and married. She admitted being mesmerized by Goldovsky, and by 1906, she was pregnant with his child. Thereafter, the couple lived together for extended periods and had two more children, while Goldovsky continued to maintain "another domestic reality" with his unsuspecting wife. A scandalous personal life, Russia's roiling political upheavals, and virulent anti-Semitism did not hinder Luboshutz's career: Celebrated wherever she performed, she came to the attention of impresario Sol Hurok and immigrated to the U.S. in 1927, where her reputation soared. A captivating story of passion and music.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 29, 2019
In this thoroughly researched biography, Wolf, a musician and arts consultant, writes of his grandmother Lea Luboshutz (1885–1965 ), one of the first internationally known female concert violinists. Detailing Luboshutz’s family life, relationships, and flight from revolutionary chaos in Russia to Europe and then the U.S., Wolf tells a fascinating tale of a Jewish woman surviving and ultimately thriving in a tumultuous time. Born in Odessa, Luboshutz survived a childhood of relative poverty. Her musical talents became apparent early in life, and by age 13 she was admitted to the Moscow Conservatory. Wolf writes evenhandedly about his grandmother, tracing her career on international concert tours to her first performance at Carnegie Hall in 1907. In 1921, following the Russian Revolution, Luboshutz emigrated to Berlin with her 13-year-old son Boris (“Lea held on to her precious Amati violin at all times. Boris was in charge of the fifty American dollars”). After a short time, they came to America, where Luboshutz obtained her famed violin, a Stradivarius named the Nightingale; performed César Franck’s “Sonata for Violin and Piano,” a piece that she championed; and became a founding faculty member of the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Classical music fans will delight in this astute assessment of an influential performer and academic.

May 1, 2019

Part biography, part memoir, musician and consultant Wolf's book about his grandmother is an intriguing look into a musical family whose lives were scarcely less dramatic than the times in which they lived. Born into a poor but determined Jewish family in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1885, Lea Luboshutz became one of the most celebrated violinists of her day. The role of fortune in Luboshutz's life and her ability to take advantage of it resound throughout this volume, whose title refers to César Franck's Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano, a core piece of violin repertoire. The work is structured as a series of vignettes arranged more or less chronologically, tracing both Wolf's own discovery of previously unrelated family history and as much of that history as he has been able to piece together. From this narrative emerges a woman whose remarkable musical gift was shaped as much by discipline and persistence as by talent, and whose journey from Ukraine to Russia to the United States proved an odyssey indeed. VERDICT An affectionate yet clear-eyed portrait. For aficionados of classical music and 20th-century musical history.--Genevieve Williams, Pacific Lutheran Univ. Lib., Tacoma

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2019
C�sar Franck's Sonata for Violin and Piano, referred to by the book's title, held a special meaning for violin virtuoso Lea Luboshutz. Her life's journey started in the final years of the Russian Empire and went on to the concert halls of Europe and the U.S. It is a fascinating story peopled by some of the most famous names in modern world and musical history. At an early age, Luboshutz was recognized for her musical talent. She popularized Franck's sonata, and it would become part of many important moments in her life, not the least of which was the evening on which she first met the revolutionary Onissim Goldovsky, with whom she had three children (one of whom was the author's mother). After leaving the chaos of revolutionary Russia, Luboshutz settled in the U.S., first as a performer; eventually, she became a founding faculty member of the Curtis Institute of Music. Wolf did extensive research and took great care in composing this compelling story of a celebrated artist and her extended family.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)