Leonard Pennario born 9 July 1924

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. He remained in Los Angeles his entire career. He can hardly have known when, aged seven, he was taken to hear Rachmaninov in concert that he would be the first pianist after the composer himself to record all four Rachmaninov concertos and the Paganini Variations. He was seven, too, when he gave his first public performance in a Buffalo department store. 

He first came to notice when he performed Edvard Grieg's Piano Concerto at age 12, with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. The scheduled performer had fallen ill, and Pennario's piano playing had come to the attention of the conductor Eugene Goossens, who recommended him as the soloist after being assured by Pennario that he knew the work. In fact, he had never seen the music or even heard it, but he learned it in a week. The 2,000 strong audience at the Texas Exposition witnessed the beginning of an extraordinary career. He was  particularly proud that he hadn't had to miss school in the process. 

He studied with Guy Maier, Olga Steeb, and Isabelle Vengerova and attended the University of Southern California, where he studied composition with Ernst Toch. World War II interrupted his career, and he served in the U.S. Army Air Forces in the China Burma India Theater, where his piano skills were soon realized and served well entertaining troops of the Air Transport Command operation known as "The Hump". He occasionally had to play around keys missing from the keyboards of the pianos at a couple of the more remote bases. He was discharged in 1946 as a staff sergeant and was awarded three Battle Stars. He had, however, made his debut, in uniform, with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall on November 17, 1943, with Artur Rodziński, playing Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1. 

                                    

Shortly after Sergei Rachmaninoff's death, the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos invited Leonard Pennario to be the soloist at a memorial concert, playing the Second Piano Concerto with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. Pennario became the first pianist after the composer himself to record all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. His recording of the Rachmaninoff 2nd Concerto was used for the film September Affair (1950), in which Joan Fontaine plays a concert pianist preparing to play the concerto. 

Pennario recorded over 60 LPs, most of them of composers dating from Chopin and later. He is perhaps best known for championing certain modern composers such as George Gershwin, Rachmaninoff, Rózsa, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and Sergei Prokofiev. In 1958, he was tied with Walter Gieseking in terms of best-selling classical records involving the piano. In 1961 the violinist Jascha Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky invited Pennario to replace Arthur  Rubinstein in a series of concerts in New York and on the West Coast and for the next three years,  Pennario recalled, "Recording with them, getting ready with them, was the biggest thrill of my life."  They won a Grammy in 1963. 

When the classical division of Capitol went belly up in the early 1980s, it derailed Pennario's recording career, but it did not affect his standing in the concert world. In 1987 Pennario played a concert at Lincoln Center that was broadcast over PBS in observance of the 50th anniversary of Gershwin's death. Although Pennario's career was focused principally on the United States (he was the first pianist to  perform in all 50), where he appeared with every orchestra and conductor of note, he was also  heard widely abroad. In 1989 he was one of the first American pianists to play in Communist China,  and he returned two years later to play not the piano but bridge, winning an "Open Pairs" event in  Beijingin 1991. 

Bridge had been Pennario's main hobby since 1965, and he became a Life Master in 1980. When in  the late 1990s the onset of Parkinson's disease forced him to give up the piano, it became the  solace of his old age. His mentor had been Alfred Sheinwold, America's leading bridge columnist.  On Sheinwold's death in 1997, Pennario remembered his friend in a letter to the bridge press: "He had a fine tenor voice, and at our get-togethers he often sang lieder by Schubert and Brahms. I would accompany him and he in turn would partner me in tournaments. Each of us felt he had the better deal!" 

In October 2007 he was inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame. He died of complications from Parkinson's disease on June 27, 2008 at the age of 83, in La Jolla, California. 

(Edited from Wikipedia, The Independent & AllMusic)