Biography (read more)
Byron Janis was born Byron Yanks in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, on 24 March 1928 to Russian-Jewish parents, and after early study with Abraham Litow became one of the very few private pupils Vladimir Horowitz accepted. He toured the Soviet Union in 1960 at the height of the Cold War, recorded for RCA and Mercury, fought severe arthritis from the 1970s onward, and died on 14 March 2024, ten days short of ninety-six.
Janis’s Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev concertos for Mercury, taped in Moscow with Soviet orchestras, are among the most electric concerto recordings ever made and occupy two volumes of the Great Pianists of the 20th Century edition. He carried the Horowitz sound into the stereo era, and his readings give this catalogue its American-romantic pole.
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