Leonard Pennario

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Leonard Pennario (July 9, 1924 – June 27, 2008) was an American classical pianist and composer. He was born in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in Los Angeles, attending Los Angeles High School and then remaining in Los Angeles for his entire lifetime. * He first noticed when he appeared with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra at age 12. * The scheduled performer had been sick, and Pennario's piano playing had piqued the conductor's attention, who had been told by Pennario that he knew the subject. * In fact, he had never seen the music or even heard about it, but he learned it in a week. He worked with Guy Maier, Olga Steeb, and Isabelle Vengerova, as well as August Leopol and Mariale Vengerova, and attended the University of Southern California, where he studied composition with Ernst Toch. * In the China Burma India Theater, where his piano skills were quickly developed and served well entertaining troops of the Air Transport Command operation known as "The Hump" until "Winter II" was postponed. At a few of the more remote bases, he had to sometimes play around keys missing from the piano's keyboards. * He was discharged as a staff sergeant in 1946 and was named three Battle Stars. However, he made his debut in uniform with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall on November 17, 1943, with Artur Rodzinski as the first piano player in Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1. 1. The conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos invited Leonard Pennario to be the soloist at a memorial concert for the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, a few weeks after Sergei Rachmaninoff's death. * Pennario was the first pianist to record all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, after the composer himself. * His recording of the Rachmaninoff 2nd Concerto was used in the film September Affair (1950), in which Joan Fontaine portrays a concert pianist who is about to appear in the concerto. * He formed a renowned trio with violinist Jascha Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, beginning in the 1960s. Miklózsa wrote a piano concerto for Pennario, but he appeared as the soloist in the first performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta. Over 60 LPs have been released, the majority of which were composed of composers from Chopin and later. * He is perhaps best known for his championing of such modern composers as George Gershwin, Rachmaninoff, Rózsa, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and Sergei Prokofiev. * In 1958, he was tied for the best-selling classical records involving the piano with Walter Gieseking. In the 1990s, Pennario retired from active participation and recording. * He wrote several pieces of his own, including Midnight on the Cliffs, March of the Lunatics, and a 4-hand translation of Chopin's Minute Waltz, who was inducted into the Official Encyclopedia of Bridge in China in 1991, most notably winning an Open Pairs tournament in China. * He was once a member of Don Adams, Les Brown, and Jack Benny's daughter Joan Benny. In La Jolla, California, Anthony Pennario's official biography is now being written by Buffalo News music critic Mary Kunz Goldman. He died of Parkinson's disease complications at the age of 83.

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