EILEEN JOYCE (1908-1991)
Australian Pianist

Who is Eileen Joyce?  If you have ever seen the movies Brief Encounter and The Seventh Veil, she has brought tears to your eyes.   She is the pianist in the performance of the Rachmaninoff 2nd Piano Concerto that was used as background music in both films, and as a result of these films Rachmaninoff became a household word.  The quality of her playing was compared, by an important German music critic of the late 1940s, to that of Clara Schumann, Sophie Menter and Teresa Carreño. And the 1950 biography of her early years became a best seller.

The eminent British pianist Stephen Hough wrote, "she displayed all the dazzle and scintillating virtuosity of many great players of the past ... she has to be added to the list of great pianists from the past."  Glenn Gould considered Eileen Joyce to be the finest interpreter of Mozart.  And it is rumored that she never played a wrong note in concert.   Yet she is virtually unknown today.

When I was a teenager in the 1960s, many of Eileen Joyce's old London/Decca recordings were still available, mostly in the bargain record bins at Sam Goody.  Today there are perhaps three CDs in print. She was fabulous.  I owned that recording of the Rachmaninov 2nd and I would kill to find it again.

Listen to Eileen Joyce play "Clair de Lune" by Debussy and see the reflection of the moonlight dance on the waves of a pool.  Hear her play Fauré as though the music were young, fresh, and spontaneous.   Her playing of the Granados Alegro de Concierto is noble, poetic, and free of the sentimentality that often plagues this music.   You are in a garden of Spain.

There are four of the Liszt concert etudes, each played as it should be played, in its own style, with its own voice.  And the etude that Rachmaninov always played to warm up his fingers. It ripples and floats. What an amazing pianist was Eileen Joyce. But her Chopin is perhaps the most marvelous of all.

You can hear Eileen Joyce play encores and salon pieces and concerti and chamber music by following these links.

Bach  Prelude & Fugue in A minor, BWV 944

recorded in 1938