Widely regarded as a virtuoso, Mr. Janis had a career of supreme triumphs and near-constant physical struggles.
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.Choose your planWhile 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.
“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.”Advertisement 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 Mr. 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.
At 15, Mr. Janis made his debut with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra playing Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto under the direction of the 13-year old Lorin Maazel; the younger of the two prodigies later became the music director of the PSO. Mr. Janis’s first marriage, to June Dickson-Wright, with whom he had a son, ended in divorce. In 1966, he married Maria Cooper, the daughter of the late movie star Gary Cooper. They lived in a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue until Mr. Janis’s death, and she is his only immediately survivor. His son, Stefan, a poet, translator and art critic, died in 2017.Mr. Janis and his wife shared an interest in what is often called “parapsychology.” In her introduction to Mr.
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