Obituary, Byron Janis (1928-2024)

The American pianist and composer Byron Janis has died, aged 95.

Born in 1928 in Pennsylvania, Janis underwent several variations in his surname - initially ‘Yanks’, after his father (who had shortened his own birth surname of Yankilevitch), later Jannes, and eventually settling on Janis.

Although an unfortunate accident aged ten led to the little finger on his left hand being numb and inflexible for his entire life, the talent of this 'nine-fingered' pianist was nevertheless prodigious, and began to make itself obvious in his teens. A performance he gave of Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto so impressed the great Vladimir Horowitz that he offered to take Janis on as a pupil - something he had never before done. Horowitz was at pains not to influence Janis unduly - not only insisting that he should be ‘a first Janis, not a second Horowitz’, but putting himself at odds with Janis’s manager by urging caution and the building-up of confidence before starting out on a substantial career.

Janis certainly heeded Horowitz's wisdom up to a point; all the same, he had signed to RCA Victor by the time he was 18, and was soon recording performances that remain highly-regarded and sought-after today. He was particularly praised in heart-on-sleeve Romantic repertoire, though critics (such as the New York Times’s Will Crutchfield) noted a certain ‘quirky’ quality where Janis’s own artistic interpretation could at times override the composer’s directions.

The political turbulence of the 1960s did not simply wash over Janis; he was involved in, or drawn into, political events more than once. He had the misfortune to be touring the USSR shortly after the Soviets had shot down an American spy-plane, but his performances (greeted rapturously by audiences) seem to have helped, in their way, to paper over the frosty relations that the incident caused. Later on, as the civil rights movements gained momentum, he withdrew from a performance in Alabama in protest at the violent repressions ordered by the state’s white supremacist governor, George Wallace.

From the 1970s onwards, Janis struggled increasingly with arthritis in both hands and wrists - at first refusing to be daunted, as the disease progressed he was forced to abandon his performing career. Surgery aimed at alleviating the arthritis resulted in his left thumb being shortened by just enough to place some of his beloved Romantic repertoire (especially that of the notoriously huge-handed Rachmaninoff) off-limits, sending Janis into a deep depression.

It was at this point that he began his first real forays into composition, with scores for both stage and screen. These were by no means unsuccessful, but it was clear that his first love remained the piano, and by the 1990s he was able to begin venturing back into performance, at first giving shorter programmes or sharing the billing with other artists. In 1998, on the 50th anniversary of his Carnegie Hall début, Janis staged a triumphant return to the performing stage with a full-length recital of Mozart, Schumann, Chopin and Prokofiev.

As someone acclaimed highly for his Chopin (among other things), it was a happy coincidence that Janis would not once but twice stumble across fascinating Chopin manuscripts - variants of two waltzes, first in a château in France and later at Yale University, which he edited and published.

Byron Janis died on Thursday 17th March at a Manhattan hospital; his son Stefan predeceased him, in 2017, but he is survived by his wife, Maria Cooper Janis.

Byron Janis - a selected discography