American pianist Byron Janis has been a powerhouse since 1942, when he played Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 with conductor Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Orchestra. Janis was just fifteen years old.
The following year, Vladimir Horowitz accepted Janis as his very first piano student, one of only three that he ever taught.
Janis would go on to play with some of the greatest conductors and orchestras of the twentieth century, including Fritz Reiner, Antal Dorati, Kirill Kondrashin and Charles Munch.
Janis, who will turn 90 this year, has just released the second of a set of three albums. His most recent album features music that was secretly recorded during a series of recitals he gave in the Soviet Union in 1960.
That year, Janis became the first American invited to give a concert tour in the Soviet Union. Unbeknownst to him, all of his live concerts were recorded.
Those unauthorized recordings from his performances in Leningrad were given to him over half a century later and now appear on this new album.
These live performances include sonatas by Mozart, Chopin and Copland as well as music of Liszt, Schumann and Falla.
Janis returned to the Soviet Union in 1962, where he recorded music (with his permission) of Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky with Kirill Kondrashin and the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra.
Diagnosed with arthritis in both hands in the early 1970s, Janis took a hiatus from performing until the 1990s.
In 2010, he published a memoir that is currently being adapted for the screen by Martin Scorsese.
Janis spoke with Classical IPR's Amanda Sewell about what a lesson with Vladimir Horowitz was like, which conductors were his favorite to work with and the film about his life that Martin Scorsese is making.
Listen to the entire conversation on demand in this post.
