His Cold War Concerts Helped Break the Ice

By BARRYMORE LAURENCE SCHERER

Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal 

June 11, 2008

This year, the American pianist Byron Janis celebrated his 80th birthday and the 60th anniversary of his Carnegie Hall debut -- milestones acknowledged by formal citations in both houses of Congress. Over the past six decades, Mr. Janis, the first of an elite handful of private pupils of the late Vladimir Horowitz, has enjoyed a varied career as a towering virtuoso pianist whose technical and intellectual gifts allowed him to perform the most challenging repertoire with diabolical panache as well as consummate musicianship. In addition, he is a gifted composer of film and dramatic music and a major spokesman for the American Arthritis Association Foundation. Yet his conspicuous successes were often punctuated by considerable pain, much of which he kept secret. Long before he developed psoriatic arthritis in his hands and wrists, a childhood accident almost ended his career before it began: At age 11 he put his left hand through a glass door, nearly severing his pinkie. Surgery saved the finger but left it completely numb. "Somehow I learned to handle it," he says, though for years this meant having to direct his finger to the correct key by sight because he couldn't feel where he was going.

 

Indeed, Mr. Janis found himself relying on this wellspring of fortitude to get through one of the early trials of his mature career: In November 1960, shortly after the American pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down while flying his U-2 spy plane over Soviet Russia, Mr. Janis walked onto the stage of the Bolshoi concert hall in Moscow, the first American pianist to tour Russia after Van Cliburn's gold medal victory at the first Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958.

Reminiscing at his New York apartment with his artist wife, Maria, the daughter of the film star Gary Cooper, he recalls that in an effort to counter the frosty diplomatic atmosphere between the U.S. and the Soviet Union both governments had established a cultural exchange. The Soviets had sent the pianist Sviatoslav Richter on an American tour, and the Americans sent Mr. Janis, already a major artist at home but completely unknown in Russia. Moreover the Russian audiences, believing that they had "discovered" Van Cliburn, maintained an emotional attachment to him that Mr. Janis had to overcome. "I played my first concert in Moscow, at the Bolshoi Hall of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, which has such a wonderful sound. But when I walked out on the stage, the first sound I heard was the audience angrily shouting 'U-2, U-2 . . .' Then they began shouting "Kleeburn, Kleeburn . . .'"

"I was almost unnerved," says Mr. Janis. "But somehow I managed to maintain control of myself by ignoring it." Calling on his emotional strength, he began playing a Mozart sonata. The audience began to thaw. Then, he says, he played the Schumann Arabesque and the Schubert Impromptu in B-flat, ending the first half with the Chopin B-flat minor Sonata. "By the intermission, you could see that I was winning them over."

The second half included Aaron Copland's Piano Sonata as a representative American work. Composed between 1939 and 1941, it was considered "difficult" music, and not widely performed. "Americans didn't quite understand it yet," recalls Mr. Janis, "so you can imagine what the Russians made of it." Nevertheless, he says, "at the end of the concert they totally exploded. People ran up to the stage in tears. And I thought to myself, I don't think these tears are due to the music but because of something else: When I first walked onto that stage I was literally the enemy. Now they saw I was just a human being, like them, who could please their deep musical spirit. And this relaxed them enough to let them release their emotions in the true Slavic manner, by crying."

After the first concert, the American ambassador, Llewellyn Thompson, confided to Mr. Janis that "since the Cliburn thing, I've heard nothing but 'America can produce nothing but cars. And because you have no culture, we Russians have had to find the only pianist you've produced.' So thank God you've come and had a success.'" During the tour, this attitude was brought home to Mr. Janis whenever he visited the conservatories in Moscow, Leningrad and other cities. "I would go whenever I was allowed, and whenever I spoke to the students they'd ask me, 'How many cities can you play in America?' I told them you can't even count them -- 150, 200. They were thunderstruck every time. 'You have that many cities where there is music?' I told them, 'Of course we do, and we have many, many musicians.' They couldn't believe it, because they had been taught that America had absolutely no cultural or musical life."

The first Moscow concert was followed by one in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), where the venue was the former Imperial ballroom in the Winter Palace, "a beautiful hall with extraordinary sound." This time the audience was not nearly so cold to start -- news having preceded his arrival -- and the response was equally enthusiastic. "The audiences were such beautiful, musical people. Sometimes I would see them out of the corner of my eye while playing. And if there was a particular phrase that they liked, I'd see them looking at each other in appreciation."

One of his most touching experiences occurred on the first trip. "A little boy came backstage after a concert and gave me a piece of chocolate. I thought, how sweet. And then I was told how prohibitively expensive and rare chocolate was in Russia at the time. And I realized just what that boy's gesture meant to him."

On another occasion, Mr. Janis discovered the adverse conditions under which some music students had to pursue their dream. "A Russian boy asked to play for me. He played a few pieces, each one mezzo piano. I finally asked him why he played every piece so softly. He said, 'Am I really playing softly?' 'Yes,' I said. 'Why?' After a moment he said, 'You know, maybe it's because I live in a small apartment with other people around, so I try not to disturb them when I practice.' This boy learned to play all his music so that no one would hear."

The success of the 1960 visit led to invitations to return in 1962 and 1970. "Something extraordinary happened on the 1962 trip. In Moscow I played three concertos, the Rachmaninoff First, the Schumann and the Prokofiev Third -- on one program." It was a special gala for the judges and contestants of the Second Tchaikovsky Competition (the competition has normally taken place every four years), held in the Bolshoi Hall of the Conservatory. The audience included Russia's musical elite, including Prokofiev's widow.

"Kiril Kondrashin [the celebrated Soviet maestro] was conducting, and after the final concerto the audience simply would not leave the hall. Kondrashin said, 'You have to play something else.' I said, 'An encore after all that? Are they crazy? I don't even have one prepared.' He quickly said, 'What tempo do you play the Tchaikovsky concerto finale?' I gave him some indication of tempo. 'Good,' he said. 'We play that for encore.' The ovation had lasted over half an hour, giving the orchestra music librarian time to get the parts ready, because we went out and played the third movement -- completely unrehearsed. So I ended up playing 3 1/3 concertos that night, which may be a world record." Record or not, Martin Mayer, writing in Esquire magazine following that tour, noted that Mr. Janis "got what observers believed to be the wildest and longest displays of approval ever offered a visiting artist."

When Russian audiences like something, they applaud loudly in rhythm, which makes a striking effect to those unfamiliar with the custom. "But it was in Tbilisi in Georgia that I heard the greatest virtuoso applauding -- their rhythmical thunder was like a steam locomotive." Georgians do not consider themselves ethnically Russian -- "and," Mr. Janis says, "they are much wilder than Russians. I played an outdoor concert there and they climbed trees to listen. It was a moment of freedom for them in which they could live in the music.

"And when we were leaving Tbilisi, someone pressed close to my car and said, simply, 'You make us love America.'"

The second tour also gave Mr. Janis his first experience of government interference in his musical choices. "Benny Goodman was also visiting the Soviet Union with his band, and in Leningrad I was scheduled to play 'Rhapsody in Blue' with them. The ministry of culture tried to stop me, asking, 'How can you want to play such inferior music?" I stood up to them, saying that Gershwin was one of our great composers. I had already played the Gershwin Concerto on my first visit -- which was the first live performance of that work in Russia. But when I played the Rhapsody with Benny, it was not just the first live performance but the first time this music was heard in Russia at all. There had been no recordings available there, because the government disapproved of the music.

More than 40 years after the fact, Mr. Janis discovered that, without his permission, his first Leningrad concert in 1960 had been recorded at the time and released commercially in the Soviet Union by the state record label, Melodiya. Showing me a copy of the CD version still available there, he says, "In all these years, Melodiya never told me they had done this." But, he says, "they actually did me a good turn, because I discovered that they had thereby preserved some pretty decent performances."

Mr. Janis is now negotiating to release a sonically restored version of the recording in the West. Apart from the performances themselves, the recording will truly be a historical document of a time when classical music forged a cultural bridge unbuildable by diplomacy or science.

Mr. Scherer writes about music and the arts for the Journal. His new book is "A History of American Classical Music" (Sourcebooks).