Byron Janis

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Byron Janis , eigtl. Yankilevitch or Jankelewitsch (born March 24, 1928 in McKeesport , Pennsylvania ), is an American pianist and composer .

Life

Janis comes from a Jewish family and received piano lessons at the age of four. Together with Ronald Turini, Nico Kaufmann and Gary Graffman , he is considered to be one of the few "real" students of Vladimir Horowitz who were continuously taught by the Russian virtuoso (in his case from 1944 to 1947).

Janis' concert tours to the former Soviet Union in 1960 and 1962 were a spectacular, also politically interpreted, success. Janis was known for his almost flawless technique and broad repertoire, which enabled him, for example, to perform three of the concerts in a single Moscow concert perform the most difficult concertos for piano and orchestra: Rachmaninoff's first, Prokofiev's third and Schumann's piano concerto in A minor.

From 1954 to 1965 he was first married to June Dickson Wright, the sister of Clarissa Dickson Wright , with whom he had a son born in 1955.

In 1966 he married Maria Cooper , the daughter of Gary and Veronica Cooper , for the second time .

In 1967 he discovered manuscripts with two unknown waltzes by Chopin in France .

In 1985 Janis announced his long-kept arthritis illness , which had forced him to gradually withdraw from concert life.

The judgments about him are contradicting: While the critic Joachim Kaiser in his book Great Pianists in Our Time found that Janis had actually not fulfilled the expectations placed in him, the Croatian pianist Ivo Pogorelich highlighted Janis' Rachmaninoff recordings as unique in a questionnaire .

Discography

  • Byron Janis: The Complete RCA Album Collection , 11 CD and 1 DVD, RCA 88725484402 (Sony)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On Byron Janis' autobiography Chopin and Beyond. My Extraordinary Life in Music and the Paranormal . Wiley 2010
  2. ↑ Kristin McMurran: Maria Cooper Janis Is the Master of the Quick Draw - just Like Her Father, Gary. In: People.com. May 14, 1979 .;
  3. ↑ The petrel in America's pianist triad. An anthology pays tribute to the devil virtuoso Byron Janis. In: FAZ of June 14, 2013, page 38.
personal data
SURNAME Janis, Byron
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American pianist, composer and musicologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 24, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH McKeesport, Pennsylvania