If the artistic identities of some performers are bound up with the recording companies that preserved their music-making -- Artur Rubinstein with RCA Red Seal, for example, or Yo-Yo Ma with the crossover-friendly incarnation of Sony/CBS -- then the face of the Naxos label and its repertory-based, high-volume, low-budget ways may well have been Hungarian pianist Jenö Jandó. He recorded a wide variety of repertory for that label, with Hungarian music strongly represented, but by no means preponderant. Jandó was born in the southern Hungarian city of Pécs on February 1, 1952. His mother taught him to play the piano, and he went on to study at the Liszt Academy in Budapest. When he was 18, he took third place in the prestigious Beethoven Piano Competition in Vienna, bringing his name before audiences beyond Hungary. He won the Sydney (Australia) International Piano Competition in 1987, but he didn't become a familiar figure to U.S. album buyers until after the founding of Naxos by the German-born, Hong Kong-based entrepreneur Klaus Heymann in the late 1980s. Jandó was one of the first artists to emerge from Naxos' efforts to record Eastern European artists on a larger scale than any organization outside the former East bloc had previously done. A Hungarian contact sent a tape of Jandó's playing to the company, and he was picked for one of the new company's showcase products: a complete recording of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas. Jandó followed those up with complete tours through Mozart's piano sonatas and concertos, Bach's entire Well-Tempered Clavier, Bartók's piano concertos, and the comparatively rarer Haydn keyboard sonatas. Jandó continued to explore the heart of the traditional repertory, delving into Schubert's sonatas and undertaking a mammoth survey of Bartók's complete piano music. He also performed chamber music, inclining toward Hungarian compositions, and he also served as accompanist to his wife, mezzo-soprano Tamara Takács. What suited Jandó so well to the Naxos operation? He was an ideal jack-of-all-classical-trades. His familiarity with the piano literature was wide, and his musical memory was legendary; though he always brought scores of the works he was to play with him to a recording session, he simply set them to one side and performed from memory. Like Glenn Gould, Jandó was given to humming along with his own playing -- a tendency his producers would forestall by placing an unlit cigarette in his mouth. Although he did not enter the trend of historical performance wholeheartedly, he recorded music of Liszt on the composer's own piano. Jandó expressed the ambition to cap off his career by recording a second complete Beethoven sonata set -- something previously undertaken only by a select group of the keyboard elite. As of the late 2010s, Jandó had not yet realized that ambition, but he did record a large amount of piano music by Schubert in the mid-2000s. He continued to record exclusively for Naxos. His output slowed somewhat in the 2010s but continued to feature unusual works such as the rare piano version of his Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross, recorded in 2014. In 2018, Jandó recorded Haydn's 10 kleine Klavierstücke (Ten Short Piano Pieces) and 24 Minuets, both unusual Haydn sets. Volumes in his Bartók survey also continued to appear, as did his 2020 recording Franz Liszt: Historical Hungarian Portraits. Jenö Jandó's prolific career finally came to an end with his death on July 4, 2023, at the age of 71. ~ James Manheim, Rovi

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Jenő Jandó

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