Janina Fialkowska

Fialkowska was born in Montreal, Quebec, to a Canadian mother (Bridget Todd Fialkowski) and a Polish father (Jerzy Fialkowski), an engineer and Polish army officer who emigrated to Canada in 1945. Her mother, of Scottish-Irish and Cree descent, studied piano in the class of Alfred Cortot at the École Normale de Musique de Paris (1935–1939). Fialkowska is the granddaughter of John Todd, Canada's first professor of parasitology,[1] and great-granddaughter of Edward Clouston, President of the Canadian Bankers Association. She is the cousin of former Canadian cabinet minister David Anderson and cousin of stage and screen actor Christopher Plummer.[2]

Fialkowska began to study piano at the age of four with her mother and in 1960 enrolled in the École Vincent-d'Indy in Montreal. In 1963, at the age of 12, she made her debut as a soloist with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and began studying with Yvonne Hubert. She pursued her secondary education at the Montreal girls school The Study, graduating in 1967. The following year, at the age of 17, she simultaneously obtained undergraduate (Baccalauréat) and Maitrise from the Université de Montréal. During this period, she also studied in Paris with virtuoso and teacher Yvonne Lefébure (1966, 1968–1969). In 1969 she was awarded 1st Prize in the CBC National Radio Competition for Young Performers in Canada and travelled occasionally to New York City for private studies with Sasha Gorodnitzki. In 1970, she settled in New York and enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music as a student of Sascha Gorodnitzki, later becoming his teaching assistant from 1979 to 1984.

In 1974, while enrolled in law school in her hometown of Montreal, Fialkowska participated in the inaugural Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in Tel Aviv. Unbeknownst to her, one of the judges gave her a zero in order to help his own student advance. But Rubinstein himself, then 87, was impressed by her playing. When he found out about the zero, he threatened to withdraw his name from the competition unless Fialkowska advanced.[3] Rubinstein became her mentor and launched her international career,[4] hailing her as "a born Chopin interpreter."

Fialkowska's solo recital tours have taken her to concert halls throughout Europe, the United States, Canada and the Far East. In Europe, Fialkowska performed as a soloist with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the Hallé Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, the Royal Philharmonic of London, the BBC Symphony, the Scottish National Orchestra, the Bonn Philharmonic, the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Krakow Philharmonic, and the Orchestre National de France.

Concerto appearances in North America have included the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada, the Calgary Philharmonic, the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, and the Vancouver Symphony.

Over the course of her career, Fialkowska has performed with many well-known conductors, including Sir Georg Solti, Zubin Mehta, Lorin Maazel, Sir Roger Norrington, Sir Andrew Davis, Bernard Haitink, Hans Graf, Charles Dutoit, Kyril Kondrashin, Sir Gilbert Levine,[5] Leonard Slatkin, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Thomas Dausgaard and Eiji Oue.

In 1986, to commemorate the centennial of the death of Franz Liszt, Fialkowska was invited to perform his complete Transcendental Études in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, in London for the BBC, and in Canada for the CBC. In 1990, she was chosen to perform, with the Chicago Symphony, the world premiere of the recently discovered Third Piano Concerto of Franz Liszt.

Fialkowska has also given world premiere performances of piano concertos by American composer Libby Larsen, with the Minnesota Orchestra (1991) and by Canadian composer Marjan Mozetich, with the Kingston Symphony (2000).

In 1992, the Colorado Symphony invited her to perform the North American premiere of the piano concerto by Sir Andrzej Panufnik. Also in 1992, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced a television documentary of her life and career, entitled The World of Janina Fialkowska, which was aired across Canada and was awarded a special jury prize at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

In January 2002, on the eve of a European concert tour encompassing eight countries, Fialkowska's career was suddenly brought to a halt by the discovery of an aggressive cancerous tumour in her upper left arm. Following the removal of the malignant mass in May 2002, she subsequently underwent an innovative surgical procedure designed to reconstruct the arm that had been rendered almost useless by the excision of the tumour. During her eighteen months of convalescence, she gave many concerts in Europe and North America, performing music written especially for the left hand by Ravel (Concerto for the Left Hand) and Prokofiev (Piano Concerto no. 4), which she adapted for performance with the right hand. Both the public and the critics praised her courage and the high calibre of these performances[6] for example with the Houston Symphony Orchestra under Stanislaw Skrowaczewski.

In 2004, Fialkowska returned to the stage as a two-handed pianist, first with a recital in Germany,[7] followed by Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto in Toronto.[8] Since then, she has resumed active touring in Canada, the United States, Europe, and the Far East performing amongst others with the Warsaw Philharmonic,[9] the Montreal Symphony,[10] the Toronto Symphony, the Suk Chamber Orchestra Prague,[11] the Vancouver Symphony,[12] the Detroit Symphony, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra,[13] the Mexico State Orchestra, L'orchestra di Camera Italiana,[14] the Badische Staatskapelle,[15] the Osaka Philharmonic[16] and many others.

In the summer of 2010, Fialkowska hosted a celebration of the works of Chopin at the Festival of the Sound.[17] In 2018, her album Chopin Recital 3 won a Juno Award for Classical Album of the Year.[18]

Fialkowska has also garnered praise for her interpretations of the works of Chopin and Liszt.[19]

Janina Fialkowska has been married to German music manager Harry Oesterle since 2001. They have homes in Connecticut and Bavaria. Her autobiography, A Note In Time, is published by Novum.[20]

Janina Fialkowska was the founder and first artistic director of Piano Six, a not-for-profit educational outreach program dedicated to supporting classical music in small communities throughout Canada. In 1993, Fialkowska convinced five well-known Canadian classical pianists to join with her in a tour of outlying communities that rarely host internationally known musicians. In order to serve as many communities as possible, Fialkowska and the other Piano Six artists agreed to perform for a fraction of their usual fees.

During its decade of operation (1993–2003), this program sent its artists on more than 60 regional tours, reaching over 100,000 Canadians of all ages with live performances, masterclasses and teachers' workshops. In 2004, in order to broaden the scope of its activities, the Piano Six roster was expanded to include Canadian musicians from the fields of strings and voice as well as piano. Under the banner of Piano Plus, the new program's associated artists continue to tour in Canada each season.

• First Prize at the CBC National Radio Competition for Young Performers, 1969.[21]
• Third Prize at the First International Arthur Rubinstein Piano Masters Competition, held in Israel, 1974.[22]
• Officer of the Order of Canada, 2001[23]
• Honorary Doctorate (Music), Acadia University Wolfville (Wolfville, Nova Scotia), 2006[24]
• Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award for Keyboard Artistry, 2007[25]
• Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement, 2012.[26]

Two of Fialkowska's recordings were nominated by the Canadian music industry for a Juno Award: her 1997 CD Fialkowska plays Szymanowski (ODR 9305) and her 1998 recital of virtuoso salon pieces La Jongleuse (CBC MVCD 1114). Her 2001 recording of Liszt's Transcendental Études (ODR 9332) earned the Critics’ Choice award from American Record Guide. She has also recorded the Liszt Sonata for RCA Red Seal and discs of various works by Chopin for Atma Classique.

In 2007, it was discovered that some recordings originally attributed to the deceased pianist Joyce Hatto (1928–2006) contained tracks that had been plagiarized from recordings by other artists, including Mephisto Waltz and Venezia e Napoli from Fialkowska's 1990 CD of works by Franz Liszt. The discovery of these plagiarized tracks led to one of the biggest scandals in the classical music recording business.[27][28]

• Rubinstein, Artur (1980). My Many Years. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-394-42253-8.
• Plummer, Christopher (2008). In Spite of myself. New York: Knopf. ISBN 978-0-679-42162-7.

• Official site, which includes a discography
• Janina Fialkowska at The Canadian Encyclopedia
• Hear Janina Fialkowska in concert from WGBH Boston
• Official site of Janina Fialkowska's project Piano Plus
• Kaylor Management
• Constellation, a short film tribute to Janina Fialkowska on her Governor General's Performing Arts Award
• Interview with Janina Fialkowska, May 22, 1989