Byron Janis, the famed classical pianist who studied with Vladimir Horowitz, recorded unknown Chopin waltzes from manuscripts he discovered and became a cultural hero in the U.S. after performing them in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, has died. It was 95.
Janis died Thursday (March 14) at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, announced his wife, Maria Cooper Janis, daughter of two-time Academy Award-winning actor Gary Cooper.
“I have been blessed with the privilege for 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 raised his talents to their highest peak,” 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. Occupied two volumes of the 1999 Mercury Philips series Great pianists of the 20th century and recorded for Philips, EMI, Sony and Universal as well.
In 1944, Janis became Horowitz's first student and made his orchestral debut with conductor Arturo Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra. At 18 he was signed to RCA Victor Records as their youngest artist.
He played at Carnegie Hall on October 29, 1948, and Olin Downes at The New York Times He wrote: “It has not been a long time since this writer heard such a talent connected with the musicality, emotion, intelligence and artistic poise displayed by the twenty-year-old pianist, Byron Janis… Everything he touched, he made meaningful and exciting 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 US and the Soviet Union. Later, he was the first American pianist to be invited back to Cuba, 40 years after his previous appearance there.
Byron Yanks (abbreviated as Yankilevich) was born on March 24, 1928, in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. His father, Samuel, owned several Army-Navy stores in the area, but lost all but one during the Depression.
Janis started out playing the xylophone before moving with his mother, Hattie, and sister in 1936 to New York to study piano with Josef and Rosina Lhévinne and then Adele Marcus.
Horowitz saw Janis perform Rachmaninov'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 that was? I was the first person he worked with,” Janis recalled in the 2009 PBS documentary. The Byron Janis Story.
“He told me something very interesting: 'You play a little with watercolors, but you can play more in oils.' What he was saying was that you could be an older, romantic, virtuoso concert pianist.”
(Only two other pianists, Gary Graffman and Ronald Turini, were ever identified by Horowitz as his students.)
In 1967, Janis accidentally discovered two unknown Chopin waltz manuscripts in France and later found two more while teaching at Yale University. The discoveries provided new insight into Chopin's creative process, and EMI would release his Chopin collection in 2012.
Janis played six times for four sitting presidents at the White House, and among his awards were a Commander of the French Legion of Honor for Arts and Letters, the Grand Prix du Disque, a Stanford Fellowship from Yale, and a gold medal from the French Society for the Encouragement of Progress (he was the first musician to receive this honor since its inception in 1906).
He composed the scores for his major musical productions The hunchback of Notre Dame and Hans Brinkerthe The silver skates and wrote one for The True Gena 2013 documentary about the 20-year friendship between Gary Cooper and Ernest Hemingway.
His trip to the Soviet Union was important, he noted, “because the Russians were saying that America can only produce cars. The whole propaganda was that we were completely uncultured.' He impressed the audience there and returned home a hero. (Watch him play in 1965 The Ed Sullivan Show here.)
Another show that year was released in 2018 as Live from Leningrad1960.
“According to Janis,” his John Von Rhein Chicago Tribune he wrote, “he was unaware that a recording had been made until a vinyl record transfer from an anonymous source was found in a mailbox of his sound engineer. The pianist is in top form (Chopin's 'Funeral March' sonata is positively hair-raising) and the restoration captures the freshness of a live performance that Russian audiences obviously enjoyed.”
A selection of original compositions by Janis will be released this year.
He published his memoirs, Chopin and Beyond: My Extraordinary Life in Music and the Paranormalin 2010.
His son, Stefan, with his first wife, June Dixon Wright, died in 2017.
When he was 11, Janis tore tendons when he accidentally put his left arm through a glass door, forcing him to change his playing. “I had to learn a way to use my eye instead of my finger so I could know where I was going,” he once told Barbara Walters. “People thought I was done.”
And in 1973, he developed painful psoriatic arthritis in both hands, but kept it a secret until 1985, when, after a performance at the White House, Nancy Reagan made his condition public when she announced his role as a spokesperson for the Arthritis Foundation. He underwent several surgeries to correct the problem.
“Despite adverse physical challenges throughout his career, he overcame them and it did not diminish his artistry,” wrote Maria Cooper Janis, 86. “Music is Byron's soul, not a ticket to stardom, and his passion and love for creating music informed every day of his life for 95 years.
“The music world, if it knows how to listen, will be continually enriched and educated by the music created by Byron Janis, my best friend, partner, LOVE — with which I have lived each day and will continue to do so with gratitude. rest of my days.”
This article originally appeared on The Hollywood Reporter.
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