Byron Janis, famed classical pianist, 95
Byron Janis, an American pianist celebrated for his extraordinary combination of technical virtuosity and urgent expression in Romantic-era music, died March 14 at a Manhattan hospital. He was 95.
The death was announced by his wife, Maria Cooper Janis, who did not specify a cause.
Janis had a career of supreme triumphs and near-constant physical struggles.
While still in his teens, he was already making recordings for RCA Victor, then the most prestigious label in America, and he became the first pianist taken as a student by the legendary Vladimir Horowitz, with whom he worked for three years. He played more than 100 concerts around the world before he turned 20.
He toured the Soviet Union twice at the height of the Cold War and, in 1962, at age 34, he presented a daunting performance in Moscow of three major piano concertos in a single program: works by Robert Schumann, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Sergei Prokofiev.
“I have now heard a pianist who can play three utterly different concertos with a perfect sense of style — one of the greatest pianists of this age,” his conductor, Kirill Kondrashin, said at the time. The audience hollered so long and with so much enthusiasm, Janis took six bows.
Janis suffered from hand problems throughout his life, essentially playing with only nine fingers. When he was 10, he was fighting with his sister and put his hand through a glass door, cutting the little finger on his left hand down to the bone.
“I was rushed to the hospital, and they had to operate,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1998. “I lost the use of a tendon, and the little joint on that finger did not bend. To this day, that finger is numb. Totally numb.”
Janis learned early on to play through his pain — a matter, he insisted, of will power.
His health troubles persisted. In 1965, Janis underwent surgery for bursitis in his right shoulder and took six months off. He took another year off in the early ’70s and soon developed psoriatic arthritis that spread to both hands, to his wrists and eventually to all his distal joints. “When I move,” he wrote in “Chopin and Beyond,” his 2010 autobiography, “it’s basically bone on bone. It hurts like hell.”
For a dozen years, Janis was quiet about his challenges, while taking fewer and fewer engagements. Then, at a White House event in 1985 with first lady Nancy Reagan, he not only spoke candidly about his condition, but announced that he would become an “ambassador for the arts” for the Arthritis Foundation, for which he played several benefits.
In 1988, he celebrated the 40th anniversary of his Carnegie Hall debut with a gala recital. Music critic Donal Henahan, writing for the New York Times, observed that Janis “tended to play as in the past, in brilliant lunges and bursts, relaxing only as if to build up energy for the next attack.”
“To those who believe there is only one way to play Chopin, in great arches and unbroken lines, such fluctuations might seem intolerably eccentric,” Henahan wrote. “In fact, they represented that current rarity, a mature artist’s personality mirrored in an infinitely various masterpiece.”
Janis was born Byron Yanks in McKeesport, Pa., on March 24, 1928, and grew up in Pittsburgh; he changed his last name before a radio appearance when he was 10.
Both parents were of Polish descent but grew up in Russia. His father ran a sporting goods store, and his mother was a homemaker.
He had made his first recordings for RCA Victor in 1947, a performance of a piano arrangement of Johann Strauss’s “Blue Danube” and continued to work with the company throughout the 1950s. He decamped for Mercury Records in the early 1960s, and his recordings of the Rachmaninoff First and Prokofiev Third concertos with Kondrashin were among the first discs ever made by American engineers in Russia. Both RCA and Mercury have issued CD sets containing Janis’s complete discs for those labels.