Moura Lympany, National Symphony Orchestra/Neel – Capriccio Brillante, Op. 22 (Mendelssohn) (1945)

Moura Lympany plays ‘Capriccio Brillante,’ with the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Boyd Neel, recorded by Decca in Kingsway Hall on 15 March 1945.

From Wikipedia: Dame Moura Lympany DBE (18 August 1916 – 28 March 2005) was an English concert pianist.

She was born as Mary Gertrude Johnstone at Saltash, Cornwall. Her father was an army officer who had served in World War I and her mother originally taught her the piano. Mary was sent to a convent school in Belgium, where her musical talent was encouraged, and she went on to study at Liège, later winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music (FRAM) in 1948.

After auditioning for the conductor Basil Cameron, she made her concert debut with him at Harrogate in 1929, aged twelve, playing the G minor Concerto of Mendelssohn, the only concerto she had memorised up to that point. It was Cameron who suggested that she adopt a stage name for the concert and a Russian diminutive of the name Mary, Moura, along with an old spelling of her mother’s maiden name, Limpenny, were chosen. She went on to study in Vienna with Paul Weingarten, and in London with Mathilde Verne, who had been a pupil of Clara Schumann and Tobias Matthay. In 1935, she made her London debut at the Wigmore Hall, and in 1938 she came second to Emil Gilels in the Ysaÿe Piano Competition in Brussels. By the Second World War, she was one of the UK’s most popular pianists.

On 13 April 1940 she gave the British premiere of Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto in D-flat, one of the pieces most closely associated with her. She had been approached when Clifford Curzon pleaded he would not be able to learn it in time.

On 25 February 1945, with Adrian Boult, Lympany was the first British musician to perform in Paris after the Liberation…

In 1944 she married Colin Defries, 32 years her senior, but they divorced in 1950. In 1951 she married Bennet Korn, an American television executive, and moved to the United States. Lympany very much wanted to start a family but she had two miscarriages, and a son who died shortly after birth. She and Bennet Korn divorced in 1961. Some years later she became a close friend of the British Prime Minister and amateur musician Edward Heath; mutual friends expressed hopes that they might marry, but this did not happen.

After the war she became more widely known, performing throughout Europe and in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India. When living in New York, Lympany continued her concert and recording career…

In 1969 Lympany was diagnosed with breast cancer and her left breast was removed. Three months after the operation she performed Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 4 for the Left Hand at the Royal Festival Hall, London. She later had a second mastectomy but continued working and gained renewed popularity. In 1979, fifty years after making her debut, she performed at the Royal Festival Hall for Charles, Prince of Wales. That year she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

In 1981 she established the annual Rasiguères Festival of Music and Wine, near Perpignan, France (for which the Manchester Camerata was resident orchestra), which ran for 10 years and also assisted Prince Louis de Polignac to establish, in 1986, the Festival des Sept Chapelles in Guidel, Brittany. From the mid-1980s she was based in Monaco. Moura – Her Autobiography, written with her cousin, author Margot Strickland, was published by Peter Owen in 1991. In 1992 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE). She also received honours from the Belgian and French governments. One of Lympany’s last public functions was as a juror for the Ninth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition held in Texas in May/June 1993.

Dame Moura Lympany died in Gorbio near Menton, France, in 2005, aged 88. Her archive was deposited in the International Piano Archives at the University of Maryland, College Park.

I transferred this recording from Decca K 1191/2. It has not been an easy transfer, firstly because of the gritty surface of the original and secondly because the orchestral sound is not particularly satisfactory in the original.

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