Joseph Fennimore in Concert

The people who remember Joseph Fennimore's piano playing in the late 1960s and early 1970s still talk about it with admiring astonishment. "A pianist of talent and temperament," declared the New York Times after Fennimore's 1967 New York City debut. "He was wonderful," echoed the Washington Post a few years later, "a rarity in an age of fine pianists." Still another reviewer summed up his review thus: "Joseph Fennimore is the name. If the concert managers, booking agents and the public have any sense at all you will be hearing more of it." To anyone familiar with Fennimore's musical personality and the subsequent development of his career, reading such statements gives a twinge. In 1974, with what looked like a career of enormous promise ahead, he gave a farewell recital in New York; apart from a couple of appearances as an accompanist, he hasn't played in public since. Born in New York City on April 16, 1940,.Fennimore grew up in the upstate towns of Ballston Spa and Scotia. He began piano study at six and at 13 made his first appearance with an orchestra. He continued his studies at the Eastman School of Music, where he was a piano student of Cecile Genhart. At the Juilliard School, where he subsequently received a master's degree, his teacher was Rosina Lhevinne. What has struck many who have heard Fennimore's playing - quite aside from the obvious brilliance and expressiveness - has been its remarkable spontaneity. It is music-making utterly uninhibited by academicism, though that statement implies no lack of intellectual content. Rare, in fact, is a musician so widely read, so intellectually probing, so articulate as Fennimore.