RIP Byron Janis, one of several American virtuosos who took the world by storm in the postwar era. Like Van Cliburn, Janis was part of the propaganda effort in the nascent Cold War: it was international news when these American pianists scored successes in Moscow. The Washington Post obituary by Tim Page does a good job documenting Janis’s unusual career, which included injury and parapsychology.
My teacher Sophia Rosoff was friends with Byron Janis, and at the funeral of Sophia’s husband Noah Rosoff (who passed in November 1996), Janis offered an exquisite Chopin D-flat nocturne, a famous piece, a mix of fragile melody and difficult fast figuration. The great pianist sounded like he was discovering each phrase afresh. An unforgettable moment.
Possibly Janis’s most important recordings were of the Rachmaninoff First Piano Concerto. Both Rach 2 and Rach 3 had found many performances, but neither Rach 1 or Rach 4 had traveled quite as far. Janis showed the world Rach 1 and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli showed the world Rach 4 in the same year, 1957. (The flip side of Rach 4 was Michelangeli’s Ravel Concerto, which Miles Davis and Bill Evans consulted when crafting Kind of Blue.)
In Janis’s memory I listened to his 1962 Mercury LP Encore. The ad copy and propaganda on the cover is dated and amusing (LIVING PRESENCE STEREO — AN ORIGINAL 35MM MAGNETIC FILM RECORDING — FIRST RECORDINGS EVER MADE IN THE SOVIET UNION BY AMERICAN TECHNICAL AND MUSICAL STAFF AND EQUIPMENT) but the playing is great.
Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6 (Liszt)
Valse Oubliée (Liszt)
Romance In F Sharp (Schumann)
The Millers Dance, From The Three Cornered Hat (Falla)
Sonetto Del Petrarca 104 (Liszt)
The Harmonica Player (Guion)
Toccata (Prokofiev)
Song Without Words Op 62. no 1 (Mendelssohn)
Novellette In F Major (Schumann)
Etude In F Major Op 25 no. 3 (Chopin)
Waltz In A Minor Op. 34 no. 2 (Chopin)
Three Scenes From Childhood (Pinto)
The repertoire is a mix of staples and surprises. Janis studied with Vladimir Horowitz — a detail that was a significant part of the Janis press kit — and both the Liszt Rhapsody and the Prokofiev Toccata were Horowitz showpieces. Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin are all to be expected, while diverse ethnic 20th-century accents are supplied by Falla, Pinto, and Guion. (More on Guion below.)
Valse Oubliée (“Forgotten Waltz”) is one of the best pieces from Liszt’s late period, and Janis plays it perfectly.
The piece is a conventional waltz “gone wrong.” The advanced harmonies are quite ghostly and spectral, while the ending drifts off in an unresolved fashion. All of this would have been quite unexpected at the time of composition in 1881.
While I have never heard Valse Oubliée as an encore at a recital, I suspect that this mysterious ending would be especially effective in that situation.
Janis played a bit of Gershwin but not much else from American composers. The one tiny example on Encore is The Harmonica Player by David W. Guion.
Today, the name David W. Guion is probably unfamiliar, but just over a century ago Percy Grainger recorded the rather fabulous Guion arrangement of “Turkey in the Straw.” The popularity of “Home on the Range” with the American public seems to stem from a Guion setting.
Guion was the “cowboy pianist.” He studied with Leopold Godowsky and took “first prize in rodeos at Estes Park and Cheyenne, Wyoming.”
I’m not certain if The Harmonica Player is really worthy of Byron Janis’s time and attention. For that matter, I’m not certain if Janis really understands the rough and ready Guion style.
Janis and Guion are essentially performing in American ethnic garb for tourists. Again, the year of the Janis recording is 1962, when one could have heard John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis, and so many others at the peak of their powers. Confronted with that standard, the Janis rendition of The Harmonica Player slinks off and hides in a corner.
However, I understand Janis wanting to present American music to his public, and Guion deserves kudos for taking a stab at his blend of vernacular and concert idioms.
Byron Janis didn’t play much dissonant or challenging 20th century music; the Prokofiev Toccata is as experimental as he got. This was common for elite concert pianists of his era, although his teacher Horowitz premiered major scores by Samuel Barber and championed extremely complex music by Alexander Scriabin.
Rachmaninoff looms large in this conversation. The pianists and the public loved him, but forward thinking composers and much of the critical establishment thought Rachmaninoff was old hat.
The Janis recording of The Harmonica Player reminds me of an earlier and better curio, Josef Hofmann’s 1919 recording of Valse Gracile by Horatio Parker and Birds at Dawn by Fannie Charles Dillon.
Hofmann was born in Poland in 1876 and went on to be one of the greatest concert pianists of all time. He had many triumphs in America and eventually settled here during World War I, where in short order helped found the Curtis Institute of Music.
Hofmann didn’t have much to do with modernism. In Dagmar Godowsky’s memoir, there’s an amusing scene where Hofmann meets Stravinsky at a dinner party: the pianist berates the composer for “ruining music.”
Hofmann didn’t do much for American composers, either. Probably he had trouble finding suitable repertoire. These “Four Numbers” by composers De Koven, Dillon, Johns, and Parker are written in an unchallenging Romantic style, and as a result they are infinitely obscure today.
Horatio Parker is much better known for being the composition teacher of Charles Ives than as a composer himself. His "Valse Gracile" is in the manner of Chopin, although the melodic line is pleasingly disjunct and the phrase lengths are unpredictable.
Fannie Charles Dillon was one of the earliest people to put literal birdsong on the piano.
Later on she taught high school music to John Cage.
"Birds at Dawn" begins with a canon at the octave harmonized in bell-like fashion
before becoming even more impressionistic in effect; the last page can be paired with Charles Tomlinson Griffes.
"Redacted" brags that this YouTube upload sounds better than previous issues, and I think they are right. At any rate, Hofmann's pianistic control on these two obscure pieces is nothing less than spectacular. Indeed, Hofmann’s performance insures Parker and Dillon a permanent spot in history.
Ethan, I don’t know where you get the time to create essays like this, but I’m grateful. More than 60 years ago, when Community Concerts, Inc. covered the country with recitals by well established classical artists at very reasonable subscription prices, my first concert was by Janis. Not something one forgets even at my advanced age when shorter term memory is less reliable. His Living Presence LPs were staples of my parents’ stereo system, and although my affection for Rachmaninoff has diminished over time, his Prokofiev Concerto #3 still delivers!
Duly noted to strike the cowboy hat for 4/1 event in Palo Alto...("strike" in the sense of excise or remove, not in the Cage-ian sense of getting it to make a sound, or not...)