Mary Gertrude Johnstone was born at Saltash in Cornwall on 18 August 1916 to an army officer and a mother who taught her the piano, was sent to a convent school in Belgium and studied at Liège before winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, where she worked with Ambrose Coviello. She made her debut at Harrogate in 1929, aged twelve, in Mendelssohn’s G minor Concerto, the only concerto she then had by heart, and the conductor Basil Cameron suggested she take a stage name: Moura, a Russian diminutive of Mary, and Lympany, an old spelling of her mother’s maiden name Limpenny. She studied further with Paul Weingarten in Vienna and Mathilde Verne in London, made her Wigmore Hall debut in 1935 and came second to Emil Gilels at the Ysaÿe Competition in Brussels in 1938. She died at Gorbio in the Alpes-Maritimes on 28 March 2005.

She gave the British premiere of Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto on 13 April 1940, taking it on when Clifford Curzon said he could not learn it in time, and it stayed attached to her name for the rest of her career. On 25 February 1945 she was the first British musician to perform in Paris after the Liberation, playing Rawsthorne’s First Concerto and the Khachaturian with Adrian Boult and the Conservatoire orchestra, though her recording of the Rawsthorne, with Herbert Menges and the Philharmonia, was not issued by HMV until 1958. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in 1948 and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1992, published her autobiography with her cousin Margot Strickland in 1991, and helped found the Festival des Sept Chapelles at Guidel in Brittany in 1986; by the end of the Second World War she was among the most popular pianists in Britain.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moura_Lympany
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q435639