Preludes : Moura Lympany(P)(1941,1942)

Throughout a career spanning over 60 years, Dame Moura Lympany was closely associated with the music of Rachmaninov. It began as an unlikely meeting of minds and fingers: what was this slight and beautiful young Englishwoman doing with music that needed the composer's own huge hands to span it's ninths and tenths, written by a man immortalized in Stravinsky's quip, 'a six-and-a-half-foot scowl'? The recordings were made by Decca in sessions between October 1941 and August 1943, and then issued month by month on individual 78 rpm records, with two preludes per disc. The release of the third 78 was welcomed by the long-standing and maverick editor of Gramophone, Compton Mackenzie, with a clerihew: 'Miss Moura Lympany/Avoids any suggestion of the timpani/Or of bringing a pan in of/Tin to play Rachmaninov.' The composer himself had recorded only seven Preludes; Lympany's colleague, Eileen Joyce, had done six of them. This Eloquence release is further enhanced by many, previously unpublished photographs of Lympany. The booklet also contains a detailed appreciation of her art, and of the context of this landmark in gramophone history, written by the piano historian Stephen Siek.