Moura Lympany

Although the British pianist Moura Lympany had a huge repertoire, she was known primarily for her playing of Romantic music from Chopin to Rachmaninoff. She was born Mary Johnstone in Cornwall in 1916, adopting her stage name—a Russian diminutive of Mary and an alternative spelling of Limpenny, her mother’s maiden name—at an early age. In 1938, she won second prize, behind Emil Gilels, at the 1938 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, which launched her career. In 1940, Lympany gave the British premiere of Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto, which she recorded many years later, and in 1941-42, she made the first complete recording of Rachmaninoff’s Preludes (two further recordings of these pieces followed, in 1951 and 1993). Among Lympany’s teachers was Tobias Matthay, whose insistence on lucid phrasing without excessive rubato is embodied in Lympany’s finest recordings. She was equally at home in music requiring fleet agility and sparkling lightness (Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto, Saint-Saëns’ Second, Liszt’s Feux follets), and in works requiring greater heft (not least her 1952 recording of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto). Lympany died in 2005.