Word: johansens
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Monday, 3 p.m.: Danish-born Pianist Gunnar Johansen, 63, gets a phone call at the University of Wisconsin, where he has been artist-in-residence since 1939. Boris Sokoloff, manager of the Philadelphia Orchestra, is on the line. Conductor Eugene Ormandy and Pianist Peter Serkin have disagreed on the interpretation of Beethoven's Piano Concerto in D Major, which Serkin was to play with the Philadelphians in Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall the following evening. Could Johansen fill in? Johansen has never even heard the piece, a little-known transcription by Beethoven of his only violin concerto. He dashes...
Monday, 10 p.m.: Johansen arrives in Manhattan, barely making a 6 p.m. flight from Madison. On the plane, he has made his first real study of the score. He has had plenty of experience. Trained in Berlin by Egon Petri, he played concerts in Europe for four years before moving to the U.S. in 1929. He has made five previous New York appearances, notably a 1966 performance of Busoni's challenging Piano Concerto. But now the magnitude of what he has undertaken overwhelms him. At a hotel, he recites "a prayer to Ludwig for help," and drops...
Tuesday, 9 a.m.: Johansen arrives at Philharmonic Hall to check the piano, decides that he needs a different one. He goes to the nearby Steinway building, chooses a piano, has it sent to the hall, then settles down for five solid hours of furious practicing. Then back to Philharmonic Hall for rehearsal, on the way gulping down a luncheon of carrot juice at a health-food store...
...Snorkels. Another architect who is fed up with faceless, anonymous architecture that conceals function is John Johansen, 49, whose Goddard Library at Clark University in Massachusetts looks more like a photocopying machine than a glassy showcase for books. Johansen believes that architects, like all thinking people today, yearn to pierce through established façades: "Nothing goes unquestioned today; nothing is taken at its face value...
...parts by exposing its chrome-plated carburetors and exhausts. Black metal snorkels funnel air in and out; angled concrete slabs shutter the windows from the sun; chimney-like staircases take the flow of students into the open bookstacks. "Architecture is not a commodity for those who can afford it," Johansen maintains. "It is a vehicle by which an architect explains his society. There must be a new architecture for our experience of the electronic...