Triple-Crown Pianist

In a day when contests are about as important to pianists as the tournament circuit to a tennis player, Pittsburgh's Byron Janis is a startling exception: he has never won or even entered a contest. At 34, Janis is getting along smartly without the benefit of contest trophies--as he reminded audiences again last week when he performed in Moscow hard on the heels of the Tchaikovsky Competition.

Present at the Moscow Conservatory for the opening concert of Janis' second Russian tour were both judges and contestants from the Tchaikovsky Competition, plus Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson. For the occasion, Janis attempted a staggering tour de force: three major concertos in a single concert. While rehearsing the Rachmaninoff First and the Schumann and Prokofiev Thirds with Conductor Kiril Kondrashin and the Moscow Philharmonic, Janis felt "like a race horse trying for the Triple Crown." Conductor Kondrashin was confident: "I have now heard a pianist who can play three utterly different concertos with a perfect sense of style --one of the greatest pianists of this age." The audience apparently agreed with Kondrashin. With an enthusiasm astonishing in a city that had been saturated in music competitions for a month, it roared and cheered after each concerto, brought Janis back for six bows at concert's end, finally forced him to play an encore despite an announcement in the program that none would be played. He chose the third movement of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, a piece that he had not rehearsed with the orchestra, but that so moved the audience it responded with another 20-minute ovation.

Limp with exhaustion when he finally withdrew backstage, Janis was congratulated by Prokofiev's widow. Said Tchaikovsky Prizewinner Vladimir Ashkenazy: "I have never heard Prokofiev played so brilliantly." As for the fans waiting for autographs at the stage door, they seemed to be struck by Janis' remarkable resemblance to the young Chopin, and by the fact, as one of them put it, that "one can tell by his face that he suffers while he plays."

At an embassy party next day, Janis improvised a little four-hand piano with President Kennedy's peripatetic press secretary, Pierre Salinger, then departed for Leningrad, where he was as enthusiastically received as he had been in Moscow. One fascinating rumor has it that he will team up with Bandleader Benny Goodman at month's end to give the first Russian performance by U.S. artists of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

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