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Piano Favorites Well-Played by a Venerable Master!

James Yelvington | USA | 08/21/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Dame Moura Lympany recorded this rather eclectic digital CD of "best-loved classics" in 1988 for EMI when she was about 72 years old. As her performances reveal, she was suffering no apparent deficiencies either of technique or interpretation. Indeed, the disk could serve as a set of exemplary performances of the 19 pieces presented, and as such might be a good reference and guide for students of the piano, as well as a handy compilation for music lovers in general.



Dame Moura (née Mary Gertrude Johnstone) was born in 1916 in Cornwall and made her début playing a Saint-Saëns piano concerto at Harrogate (England) at age 12 after early studies in Belgium, first at a convent school then at the Liège Conservatory. [Her professional name was created for the début by uniting a variant form of "Mary" with a reworking of her mother's maiden name "Limpenny," thus giving this native Brit a foreign-sounding monicker at a time when continental European musicians enjoyed higher status around the world.] Fluent in French from an early age, she traveled Europe freely to study and to perform, eventually settling in southern France, where she died in 2005.



Unlike many artists she did not choose to specialize in any composer or stylistic period, playing whatever music she liked and her audiences enjoyed. She did, however, gain special recognition for her performances of the Russian composers Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, and Khatchaturian. (In 1940 she gave the British première of Khatchaturian's dashing and colorful Piano Concerto No. 1.)



The breadth of her repertoire makes her especially suited to record a CD such as the present one, and the results accord with the expectation: all of the performances here are of a pretty high caliber, nearly flawlessly executed and persuasively interpreted. It comes as no surprise, then, that two years later (1990) EMI recorded a second CD to cover works which could not be included on the first. (Between the two, some 150,000 copies were sold.)



If you want a fine selection of piano classics, very well played and recorded in digital sound, you could hardly go wrong with this disk, which offers 71+ minutes of great piano favorites at a modest price. And don't forget to pick up the follow-up CD (Best Loved Piano Classics II) as well! (I see that it's been discontinued, but there are still copies available here--at bargain prices.)

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