Grant Johannesen, who died Sunday in Berlin, was one of the foremost interpreters of French piano music in America.

A concert pianist who had toured with the New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos and the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell, Johannesen was also renowned for his work in recitals. During his 10-year marriage to the cellist Zara Nelsova, the two often toured together and played to rapturous reviews.

In 1963, Johannesen undertook a three-week, five-city tour of the Soviet Union – a far more exotic undertaking in those Cold War days than in detente years, when artistic exchange became the norm – where he was received with something approaching hysteria. At one concert in Moscow, “a wildly cheering audience refused to let American pianist Grant Johannesen leave the stage of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory Wednesday night in one of the greatest triumphs ever scored by a visiting artist,” the New York Herald Tribune reported. After a fairly conventional program of Mozart, Beethoven, Franck, and Schumann, Johannesen played “Ragtime” by Virgil Thomson as an encore. The audience called him for five more encores.

Soviet life left a somewhat less sanguine impression on the pianist, who complained that even the musicians knew “very little about the mainstream of European classics, or about modern music.” He was happy to return home to find “something besides chicken a la Kiev for a change.”

He liked to say that he was more interested in the patient mastery of an entire repertoire than “causing a thunderstorm in the concert hall,” and once told the Salt Lake City Tribune: “If you haven’t got the willpower to realize that it isn’t a flashy kind of career, you’re more like a nightclub entertainer.”

Johannesen served for 10 years as president of the Cleveland Institute of Music, and in recent years had worked frequently with the Utah Symphony. One of his last projects was “Mormoniana,” a suite incorporating piano music by 16 composers with roots in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “As long as I’ve been away,” Johannesen said before a 2001 concert with the Utah Symphony, “I feel more and more like a Utah man.”

Although not a Mormon, Johannesen grew up in Salt Lake City and at 17 moved east to study with the French composer who headed piano classes at the American Conservatoire at Fontainebleau, Robert Casadesus. He also studied with Nadia Boulanger, Egon Petri, and Roger Sessions, all of whom provided him with a rigorous grounding and an interest in contemporary repertoire that would remain his touchstone for his entire career.

In 1944, Johannesen made his New York debut to strong reviews, and by 1946, the Times cooed, “Anyone who can perform the tricky ‘Impromptu of Faure’ presented, with the interpretive and technical merits Mr. Johannesen exhibit in his account of it, is surely an artist who should have a big future before him in his chosen field.”

Johannesen went on to be the first to record the complete Faure piano music, and remained that composer’s finest American interpreter. In addition to better-known artists like Ravel and Debussy, he also championed such French composers as Poulenc, Milhaud, and Saint-Saens, all of whom he recorded. The French made him a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.

If he was perceived as rescuing some composers from undeserved obscurity, Johannesen had no desire to preserve them in amber. “I would rather have an American style of the 1980s and play Beethoven from that standpoint than engage in a historical reconstruction of the style of Beethoven’s time,” he told the Times. “I distrust ‘authentic’ performances – with some of these players you have the feeling that they’re going to a medium, that they think they’re in direct touch. We can’t be – and we’ll learn more about Beethoven and Chopin from the music of our time than from chasing the ghost of a supposed tradition.”

Johannesen lived in New York and performed regularly in the city. On April 30, he was scheduled to perform at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. On the program were Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, and Faure.

Grant Johannesen

Born July 30, 1921, in Salt Lake City; died March 27 at a friend’s home at Berlin, Germany, of unknown causes; survived by his son, David, and two grandchildren.