VIGOUR AND SPIRIT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 465, 21 May 1948, Page 20

VIGOUR AND SPIRIT

Listeners Should Enjoy Moura Lympany

OURA LYMPANY, the young English pianist who has been variously described as "the greatest living woman pianist," "the best of the women pianists now before the public," and "etoile de premiere grandeur," will visit New Zealand in midJuly to give a series of public concerts and will be heard in studio broadcasts from the main National stations. On her way out she will spend a few days in Australia, where she will broadcast and play with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, ; Moura Lympany made her first public appearance at the age of 12, when she played Mendelssohn’s G Minor Concerto at Harrogate under the conductorship of Basil Cameron. After this she undertook a tour of England as a child prodigy, and made broadcasts for the BBC. She had her first piano lessons at the age of seven while at school in Belgium, and studied for a time under Jules Debefve ‘of the Liege Conservatoire. When she was 13 she won the Ada Lewis Scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music, and at 15 won the Academy’s Challen Gold Medal and the Hine Gift for Composition. At this stage of her career she de- cided to break off public engagements and devote herself to prolonged study. aah eee

She worked under Paul Weingarten in Vienna and the late Mathilde Verne and Tobias Matthay in England. In 1938 she entered for the Ysaye Pianoforte Competition at Brussels, and her success there (she won second prize) led to engagements in Britain and a concert tour of South America, She returned to England when war broke out, and in the following years her remarkable playing established her as the most brilliant of the younger generation of pianists, Under the Piano She had many adventurous experiences in England during the air-raids, and says that when she was living at her Surrey home she always used to sleep under her grand piano to get protection from flying glass and blast. The night before she was scheduled to give a recital at Queen’s Hall, London, the building was destroyed by fire following a bombing attack. When she arrived from the country in the morning she found the hall a gutted shell, with a billboard displaying her name flapping uneasily on one of the remaining walls. The concert took place, however, only an hour late, in the near-by Duke’s Hall. Leter she toured the large manufacturing towns of Britain, giving recitals to warf-workers. She found herself in (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) many perilous situations because of fly-| ing bomb attacks, but despite the difficult and unreliable travel conditions of those times she never missed an engage- | ment, In 1943 and 1944 she was chosen as the soloist for opening nights at the Promenade Concerts conducted by the late Sir Henry, Wood. She was also one of the first artists to play in Paris after the liberation in 1945, and represented British music (with Sir Adrian Boult) at the Prague Music Festival of 1946. In the same year she broadcast in Canada and the United States, and since then has given recitals in most of the European countries. Incidentally, she obtained a small measure of notoriety through being the first person to play Khachaturian’s flashy piano concerto in England, France, and Belgium. She added to her list of firsts by giving the first pérformance of John Ireland’s Piano Concerto in Italy, and of Alan Rawsthorne’s Piano Concerto in France. Vigour and Verve Critics of Moura Lympany comment on her astonishing vigour and verve and ‘wide range of expression, the spirited strength and compelling rhythmic attack of her playing, her ability to produce when required an astonishing display of pyrotechnics, and the virtuoso-like authority of all her performances. ‘Miss Lympany is one of the very few pianists who can produce an immense volume of sound without banging," said the Manchester Guardian critic. "She fascinates listeners to an equal extent by the strength of her tone in loud passages, by the feathery lightness of her pianissimo touch, and by the depth of her emotional expression whether she is playing loudly or softly." Moura Lympany has made many recordings, and she is perhaps best known to listeners here for her brilliant and sympathetic recording of the Khachaturian Piano Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted — by Fistoulari. She has also recorded the Grieg Concerto in A Minor (with the National Symphony Orchestra) and the Saint-Saens Concerto No. 2 in G Minor (with the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Warwick Braithwaite).