PHOTO: Pianist Marjorie Janove performs at Cedar Sinai Park's Rose Schnitzer Manor in this undated photograph. (Courtesy Marjorie Janove)

Marjorie Janove has played piano with Joseph Silverstein and the Utah Symphony Orchestra. Today, she frequently plays for different audiences.

“I really feel committed to bringing music to shut-ins, to people who otherwise wouldn’t have it or people who are either immobile altogether or have memory issues or those who live in assisted living situations and can’t get out as much as they used to,” she said.

Janove, now a Portlander, frequently travels to retirement communities around the area, including Courtyard Village, the Rose Schnitzer Manor, and the Robeson Jewish Health Center, to bring music to those very people. It’s a practice she started in her days in Salt Lake City with her three children – a cellist daughter and two violinist sons. She is planning a future performance with her younger son, with whom she practices weekly over Zoom, but most of her playing today is solo.

Her hour-long programs are split in two parts. The first is some of her favorites from her classical repertoire – Chopin, Debussy and Beethoven, among others. The second half, however, gets more modern.

“I want the programs to have broad appeal, and I feel like if I just do classical music, it’s a little limiting,” Janove said. “People like pop music, and there’s a reason for it.”

Inspired by the work of Francesco Tarino, Janove has worked with a high school friend, David Lovett, to bring classic pop and Broadway tunes to the piano. Lovett a researcher by trade, locates videos and recordings of classic songs and Janove transcribes them – that is, she writes them out for piano, by ear, one note at a time. From “As Time Goes By,” from the classic film, “Casablanca,” to the Beach Boys, to 1920’s dance tunes and so much more (including a bit of Frank Sinatra at her husband’s request) - much of the 20th century’s music has made its way from recording to ink to the ivories under Janove fingers. It’s a painstaking process, but the payoffs are immense.

“The whole idea is to play music that brings back memories because the last part of the brain to deteriorate is the part that holds music,” Janove explained. “So even people with severe memory loss, that part of their brain is still very much alive, and so it excites me to see their response.”

Janove and her children would visit aging friends in retirement communities around national holidays, bringing cookies and smiles.

“We enjoy our older people,” Janove said of her family. “I was raised that way. I was around a lot of older people, so it wasn’t a strange thing to go over and visit. My daughter would give manicures to some of the residents, but I thought, ‘They don’t need a manicure, they need music.’”

In Portland, Janove became friends with Noreen Farnham, z”l, quickly after moving to town. When Farnham entered memory care at Robeson, Janove would visit her and play some of her favorite pieces – Debussy’s “Clair de lune,” and songs by George Gershwin. After Farnham’s passing, Janove played a concert at Robeson in her honor.

Janove also plays at home; her living room is more of a piano room, being built around a nine-foot-long concert grand with space for 40 or so seats. It’s space she’s used to host fundraising performances for Hadassah, the Portland Kollel, and Chabad of Oregon. She also regularly plays at Kaiser Permanente’s Beaverton offices, which features an open, three-story lobby equipped with a piano that reverberates sound beautifully throughout the building. But the retirement facility concerts are special – the reason can be summed up in one listener’s experience at one of Janove’s performances at Robeson.

“She’s just sitting there and she’s completely in her own world, just smiling and immersed in the music,” Janove said of this particular concertgoer. “I didn’t see it because I was playing the piano. But my husband did.”

Janove will perform two shows at the Cedar Sinai Park campus Thursday, Aug. 7 – at Rose Schnitzer Manor at 1 pm and at Robeson at 2:15 pm.