Ray Lev

"[3] Her annual recitals in Carnegie Hall were generally sold out; she also toured successfully in Europe, the United States, and Canada and performed on radio network broadcasts.

For instance, in November 1945, again at Carnegie Hall, she gave the premiere of Louise Talma's Alleluia in Form of a Toccata[5] and of 24-year-old Douglas Townsend's Sonatina No.

[9]) Little information about her appears thereafter, and her name is largely forgotten today, although one reference suggests that she continued playing throughout her remaining life, including nearly annual Carnegie Hall recitals, and performed the Schumann Piano Concerto in April 1968, a month before her death.

[11] After the Khruschev revelations about Stalin in 1956 she suffered a nervous breakdown and bitterly regretted her political engagements - and refused to sign a petition against the Vietnam War in 1967.

In 1964 she took up a teaching post at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts after spending a few years in England with her friends the Huxleys near London.She returned to New York and gave 2 recitals in 1967 and 1968, the latter with music only by Schumann.

The fliers for her concerts were produced by Harry Abrams, whose wife Nina was a first cousin of Ray Lev.Presumably, however, she became primarily a teacher; her students include Anne Gamble,[12][circular reference] Aki Takahashi,[13] Sophia Rosoff, composer Bob Telson, and the currently active American pianists Joel Sachs[14] and Miriam Brickman.

[16] Flyers for Lev's recitals are housed in the Carnegie Hall Archives, and feature both a promo photo taken by Eliascheff and a reproduction of a 1950 painting by Raphael Soyer.

[17] After World War II, Lev began making phonograph records for the Concert Hall Society label,[1] issued first on 78 RPM disks and then on LPs.

She set down some adventurous literature for the day, including Schubert’s Piano Sonata in C Major, D. 840 (Reliquie) with the completion by Ernst Krenek,[18] probably otherwise represented on records in this form only by the slightly later performance of Friedrich Wührer on Vox.