Byron Janis Dies: Classical pianist was 95 years old

Byron Janis, the famous classical pianist who studied with Vladimir Horowitz, recorded previously unknown Chopin waltzes from manuscripts he discovered, and became a cultural hero in the United States after performing in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, has died. He was 95 years old.

Janis died Thursday at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, his wife Maria Cooper Janis, the daughter of two-time Academy Award-winning actor Gary Cooper, announced.

“I have been blessed with this privilege over 58 years of loving and being loved not only by one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, but by an extraordinary human being who took his talents to their highest levels,” she said in a statement. .

During his 85-year career, Janis has covered composers from Bach to David W. Guion and performed major piano concertos by Chopin, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Liszt, and Prokofiev. Occupy two volumes of the 1999 Mercury Philips series Great pianists of the twentieth century And has recorded for Philips, EMI, Sony and Universal as well.

In 1944, Janis became Horowitz’s first student and made his orchestral debut with Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony Orchestra. At the age of 18, he signed with RCA Victor Records as their youngest artist.

He performed at Carnegie Hall on October 29, 1948, and at Olin Downs New York times He wrote: “Not for a long time has this writer heard such a talent for music, feeling, intelligence, and artistic balance as was displayed by the twenty-year-old pianist Byron Janis… Everything he touched, he delivered important and brilliant work by the most legitimate and expressive means.”

During the Cold War, Janis became the first American artist selected to participate in the 1960 cultural exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. Later, he became the first American pianist to be asked to return to Cuba, 40 years after his previous performance there.

Byron Yanks (shortened from Yankelevitch) was born on March 24, 1928, in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. His father, Samuel, owned several Army and Navy stores in the area but lost all but one of them during the Depression.

Janis began playing the xylophone before moving with his mother Hattie and sister in 1936 to New York to study piano with Joseph and Rosina Levine and then Adele Marcus.

Horowitz saw Janis perform Rachmaninoff’s “Concerto No. 2” at a concert in Pittsburgh and continued to give him lessons at his home on New York’s Upper East Side for three years. “Can you imagine how exciting it was? I was the first person he worked with,” Janice recalled in the 2009 PBS documentary The Byron Janis Story.

“He said something very interesting to me: ‘You play a little with watercolors, but you can play more with oils.’ What he was saying was that you can become a greater, more romantic, more creative pianist.

(Only two other pianists, Gary Grafman and Ronald Turrini, are acknowledged by Horowitz as his students.)

In 1967, Janice accidentally discovered two previously unknown manuscripts of Chopin’s waltzes in France, and later found two more while teaching at Yale University. These discoveries provided new insight into Chopin’s creative process, and his book would be published by EMI Chopin set In 2012.

Janice has performed six times before four White House presidents, and her awards include Commander of the French Legion of Honor of Arts and Letters, the Disco Grand Prix, a Stanford Fellowship from Yale University and a Gold Medal from France. Society for the Encouragement of Progress (he was the first musician to receive this honor since its establishment in 1906).

He composed scores for major musical productions Hunchback of Notre Dame And Hans Brinker, or Silver Skates He wrote one to The real generala 2013 documentary about the 20-year friendship between Gary Cooper and Ernest Hemingway.

He pointed out that his trip to the Soviet Union was important, “because the Russians were saying that America could only produce cars.” The whole propaganda was that we were completely uncultured. He impressed the crowd there and went home a champion. (Watch him perform in 1965.) The Ed Sullivan Show here.)

Another performance from that year was released in 2018 as Live from Leningrad, 1960.

According to Janice, “John von Rhein of Chicago Tribune He wrote: “He was unaware that a recording had been made until a vinyl transfer sent by an anonymous source appeared in his sound engineer’s mailbox. The pianist is at the top of his game (Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ sonata is positively hair-raising), and the restoration captures the joy of “The live performance was clearly enjoyed by the Russian audience.”

A selection of Janis’s original compositions will be released this year.

He published his memoirs, Chopin and Beyond: My Extraordinary Life in Music and the Paranormalin 2010.

His son Stephen, whom he had with his first wife, June Dixon Wright, died in 2017.

When he was 11 years old, Janis tore a tendon when he accidentally stuck his left hand through a glass door, forcing him to change the way he played. “I had to learn a way to use my eyes instead of my fingers so I knew where to go,” he once told Barbara Walters. “People thought I was done.”

In 1973, he developed painful psoriatic arthritis in both hands but kept it secret until 1985 when Nancy Reagan, after a performance at the White House, made his condition known when she announced his role as spokesman for the Arthritis Foundation. He underwent several surgeries to fix the problem.

“Despite adverse physical challenges throughout his career, he overcame them, and it did not diminish his artistic prowess,” Maria Cooper Janis, 86, wrote. “Music is Byron’s soul, not a ticket to stardom, and his passion and love for making music exemplifies every day of his 95-year-old life.

“The world of music, if it knows how to listen, will be continually enriched and educated by the music created by Byron Janis, my best friend, my companion, my love – how grateful I have lived with him every day and will continue to do so for the rest of my life.” “For the rest of my days.”