Moura Lympany

Moura Lympany at the Rasigueres Festival of Music and Wine c1990

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.

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 Felix 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 an old spelling of her mother's maiden name, Limpenny, was chosen.

She went on to study in Vienna with Paul Weingarten, 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.

In 1940 she gave the British premiere of Aram Khachaturian's Piano Concerto in D flat, one of the pieces most closely associated with her. In 1944 she married Colin Defries, 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 politician and amateur musician, Edward Heath, and 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 USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India. When living in New York, Lympany continued her concert and recording career. Lympany was a Steinway pianist and participated in the Steinway Centenary Concert on 19 October 1953 in which ten Steinway pianists played a Polonaise by Chopin. Most famously the rehearsal of this piece was recorded and broadcast on Ed Sullivan's television show at that time called Toast of the Town.

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, Op. 53, 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 and the following year she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). In 1992 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order (DBE). She also received honours from the Belgian, French, and Portuguese governments. Moura - Her Autobiography, written with her cousin, author Margot Strickland, was published by Peter Owen in 1991.

In 1981 she established the annual Rasiguères Festival of Music and Wine, near Perpignan (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 but she died in Gorbio near Menton, aged 88. Her archive was deposited in the International Piano Archive [1] at the University of Maryland, College Park[2].

A succession of reissues of Lympany archive recordings has contributed to both maintaining her reputation and introducing her to post-LP generations including CDs issued by Dutton (Mozart K414 and K467), Ivory Classics (Mendelssohn, Litolff, Liszt), Olympia (Rachmaninov and Prokofiev), Pristine Audio (Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto No 2) and Testament (Rachmaninov Preludes).

Notable recordings

• Brahms, Intermezzi (EMI)
• Britten Piano Concerto No 1 in D, Op. 13
• Chopin, The Complete Nocturnes (Angel)
• Chopin, 24 Preludes, Op. 28 (Erato)
• Khachaturian, Piano Concerto (Decca)
• Prokofiev, Piano Concerto No. 1 (Angel)
• Prokofiev, Piano Concerto No. 3 (Decca)
• Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No. 1 (Angel)
• Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No. 2 (HMV)
• Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No. 3 (Decca)
• Rachmaninoff, 24 Preludes (Erato)
• Alan Rawsthorne Piano Concerto No. 1 (HMV)
• Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor (Pristine Audio)
• Schubert Piano Quintet in A "The Trout" - with principals of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (EMI)
• Litolff, Concerto Symphonique No. 4 in D Minor, Op. 102 (Ivory Classics)

Persondata
Name	Lympany, Moura
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	18 August 1916
Place of birth
Date of death	28 March 2005
Place of death