The NY Times reported his death last Wednesday. I'm hoping someone with more computer skills than I have(i.e. almost anybody)can post the interesting obituary by Allan Kozinn.

I heard him once or twice over 20 years at, I believe, the Grace Rainey Rodgers auditorium and possibly at Trinity Church also. My only memory of what I remember as a terrific recital was that he created great excitement in the final movement of the Prok 7th Sonata (even though he did not play it particuarly fast).

Has anyone else heard him in recital or recordings or been to any master classes with him?

Yes, pianoloverus; this was posted last week.

http://www.pianoworld.com/ubb/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?/topic/2/7662.html

Regards,

The NY Times review is much longer so if anyone wants to post it, it may be of interest.

Grant Johanessen was an underrated pianist. Very deep and thoughtful. I loved his playing of the Faure Ballade.

Grant Johanessen studied with Mabel Board Jenkins in SLC, Utah as a very young man. After he was established on the concert stage he would come to Utah every season and perform with the Utah Symphony. Last time I heard him with the USO he performed the Grieg Piano Concerto. As always it was performed in excellent taste and to perfection. He was a wonderful man to visit with. French Music was his love and he performed it beautifully. The piano world has lost a great pianist. Thanks for posting the notice.
My teacher at the UofU, Lowell Farr was a very close
friend of Grant.

Here's the link (you may have to register, which I recommend; it's free):

Johannesen Obituary

And here's the text:

Grant Johannesen, Unorthodox Pianist, Is Dead at 83[/b]

By ALLAN KOZINN

Published: March 30, 2005



Grant Johannesen, a pianist best known as an elegant interpreter of early-20th-century French music, died on Sunday at a friend's home near Munich. He was 83 and lived in New York and Palm Beach, Fla.

His son, David Johannesen, announced the death.

Mr. Johannesen was a sensitive player who was more interested in exploring musical byways that fascinated him than in repeating the warhorses of the repertory, and as a teacher, he advised his students to follow a similar path. That is not to say that he ignored the standard works entirely: throughout his six-decade career, his recital programs often included music by Bach, Beethoven or Chopin amid contemporary American works and French scores, and he made superb recordings of Chopin in the 1950's and of Schubert in the late 70's.

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Mostly, though, his focus was on the music of Fauré, Poulenc, Milhaud, Dukas and Saint-Saëns, which he played with a graceful touch and an incomparable ear for coloration and nuance.

Mr. Johannesen championed American music, too. On his first tour of the Soviet Union, in 1962, his main showpiece was Wallingford Riegger's Variations for Piano and Orchestra, and he performed and recorded music by Copland, Mennin, Barber, Harris and Norman Dello Joio, as well as that of earlier American composers like Edward MacDowell and Louis Moreau Gottschalk.

After a performance of Gershwin's Concerto in F that was broadcast on the radio early in his career, Mr. Johannesen received a telegram from Duke Ellington saying that Mr. Johannesen's performance was the best Gershwin playing he had heard. More recently, Mr. Johannesen performed works by Crawford Gates, and undertook a project to publish and record the works of his first wife, Helen Taylor, who died in an automobile accident in 1950.

Mr. Johannesen's second marriage, to Zara Nelsova, the cellist, ended in divorce. Besides his son, of Santa Monica, Calif., he is survived by a sister, Helen Schriver of Phoenix, and two grandchildren.

Grant Johannesen was born in Salt Lake City on July 30, 1921, and began studying the piano at 5, when it was discovered that he could play by ear the music he heard at a neighbor's piano lessons. When the French pianist Robert Casadesus gave a recital in Salt Lake City in 1939, he listened to Mr. Johannesen play and invited him to study with him at Princeton. Mr. Johannesen also studied with the pianist Egon Petri and was a composition and music student of Roger Sessions in New York and of Nadia Boulanger at her conservatory at Fontainebleau, France.

Mr. Johannesen made his New York debut in 1944 and undertook his first tour of Europe in 1949 as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic, having made his debut with the orchestra two years earlier. Also in 1949, Mr. Johannesen won first prize at the Queen Elisabeth of Belgium International Music Competition. In the early 50's, he performed regularly on the "Bell Telephone Hour" and other television and radio shows, and was at the top of his form as a recitalist.

Mr. Johannesen played frequently with the New York Philharmonic through the early 70's, but starting in the 50's, devoted himself increasingly to touring South America, Europe and the Soviet Union, where he performed to great acclaim in 1962, as a soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1965, and in 1970.

His fascination with the French and American repertory began early, during his childhood studies in Utah with Mabel Borg Jenkins, whom he described as having a curiosity about new music that he found infectious.

In New York, though, he encountered some resistance to his preferred repertory. After one of his first Fauré recitals, one colleague asked him why he bothered.

"I said, 'listen to it for a while, it's marvelous music,' " Mr. Johannesen told an interviewer in 1978. "I suppose part of the problem is that Fauré has been considered a song composer primarily, and most people have never heard anything except the Requiem. But he is a very quicksilver composer who writes in long, sinewy lines and who can make quite an effect."

Mr. Johannesen taught for many years. As the director of the Cleveland Institute of Music from 1974 to 1985, he tried to persuade students to take time away from practicing to visit art museums and to rethink their ideas about musical careers.

"It's relatively easy to impress people with technique and virtuosity, but I don't believe that's the point of making music," he once told an interviewer.

"Music contains ideas, and it's the responsibility of the artist to communicate those ideas," he continued. "Anything less than that doesn't interest me."
(c)2005 New York Times