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Leonard Pennario Top Selling Recording Pianist Dies

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Pianist Leonard Pennario, a best-selling recording artist

Pennario who made his concert debut with the Dallas Symphony at age 12 after learning Grieg's Piano Concerto in a week so he could play it from memory, died Friday at his home in La Jolla after a long illness, according to his biographer, music critic Mary Kunz Goldman. He had been battling Parkinson's disease, she said. He was 83.

“Playing with this musician has been one of the joys of my life," Greek conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos once said of Pennario. “He has technique, but he has what is more important, a soul."

Writing in a London paper in 1952, critic Andrew Porter said, “Pennario's playing knows no limit. The technique is magnificent and unshakable."

Pennario was one of only two pianists named permanent members of the jury of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. (The other was Hungarian-born Lili Krauss, who died in 1986.)

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