Dame Moura Lympany was an extraordinarily gifted pianist. Had she been a man, hers would be a household name. Nonetheless, she was awarded second prize in the 1938 Ysaÿe International Festival in Brussels. To give you an idea of whom she competed against, Emil Gilels was the first prize winner with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli only in seventh place. The jury included Arthur Rubinstein, Samuil Feinberg, Emil von Sauer, Ignaz Friedman, Walter Gieseking, Robert Casadesus, the reigning virtuosi of the time, and Arthur Bliss, an important English composer.
Her touch was sublime as was her phrasing and structural vision. Just listen to
Moura Lympany's Chopin
which was exquisite, her Granados delicately Spanish, her Debussy oh so French, her Liszt a sparkling canvas, and her Rachmaninov .... well, her Rachmaninov!!
Probably the first great woman pianist to specialize in the works of Sergei Rachmaninov, certainly the first pianist to record the complete Preludes which she did in 1945, she could play the most daunting passages without calling attention to their technical difficulties.
If you listen carefully to her playing you will discover polyphonies you never suspected. Her ability to give each voice its own tonal quality was stunning. That point at which one gasps because a pianist has managed a finger breaking passage is with her a moment of sheer incredulity because she has bent the piano to her will and made it resplendent with orchestral timbres.
