Biography (read more)
Leonard Pennario (1924-2008) was an American classical pianist and composer. Born in Buffalo, New York, he grew up in Los Angeles and remained based there for his whole career. He came to notice at twelve, playing Grieg’s Piano Concerto with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra after learning the work in a week, and studied with Guy Maier, Olga Steeb and Isabelle Vengerova, taking composition with Ernst Toch at the University of Southern California rather than following a conservatory route. He made his debut with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall on 17 November 1943, in uniform and aged nineteen, playing Liszt’s First Piano Concerto under Artur Rodzinski; the Second World War then interrupted his career, which he spent with the U.S. Army Air Forces in the China-Burma-India theatre. From the 1960s he played in a celebrated trio with the violinist Jascha Heifetz and the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. He retired from active performance and recording in the 1990s and died of complications of Parkinson’s disease in La Jolla, California, on 27 June 2008.
Pennario was, for a stretch of the 1950s, the best-selling American-born classical pianist on record: he made more than forty albums for Capitol between 1950 and 1960 and some twenty more for other labels, over sixty LPs in all, and in 1959 both the New York Times and Musical America named him the top-selling American-born classical pianist. He was the first pianist after Rachmaninoff himself to record all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos together with the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and he was an early and persistent champion of Gershwin, Gottschalk, Prokofiev and of living film composers – Miklos Rozsa wrote a piano concerto for him, which he premiered with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta. The Recording Academy lists seven Grammy nominations for him, running from the very first Grammy Awards (Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini) to the Heifetz-Piatigorsky chamber records of the 1960s, and one win, for the 1996 Best Historical Album The Heifetz Collection. Dimitri Mitropoulos, who invited him to play the Rachmaninoff Second at the composer’s memorial concert, said of him: “He has technique, but he has what is more important, a soul.”
Sources:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Pennario
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Pennario
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Pennario
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Pennario
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Pennario
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Pennario
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Pennario
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Pennario
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Pennario
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Pennario
- https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/grammy-winning-pianist-leonard-pennario-dies-1.711897
- https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/grammy-winning-pianist-leonard-pennario-dies-1.711897
- https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/grammy-winning-pianist-leonard-pennario-dies-1.711897
- https://www.grammy.com/artists/leonard-pennario/9743/
- https://www.grammy.com/artists/leonard-pennario/9743/
- https://www.grammy.com/artists/leonard-pennario/9743/
- https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=wbgetentities&sites=enwiki&titles=Leonard%20Pennario&format=json&props=claims|sitelinks
- https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/artist/f117a265-41c0-4ae0-97c6-afa906440858?fmt=json
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVytqKsaZmahPzotyJzTxwA