Yves Philippe Avit Nat was born at Béziers on 29 December 1890. He was a prodigy of a conspicuous kind: by the age of seven he was allowed to improvise at the organ of Béziers cathedral during Sunday mass, and at ten he conducted an orchestral work of his own. Gabriel Fauré and Camille Saint-Saëns encouraged him towards formal study, and he entered the Paris Conservatoire in the class of Louis Diémer, taking a first prize in 1907.

He gave a large part of his career to chamber music, touring with the violinists Jacques Thibaud and George Enescu and playing duo recitals with Eugène Ysaÿe. He first toured the United States in 1911. In 1937 he stepped back from the concert platform to concentrate on teaching at the Paris Conservatoire and on composition, returning in 1953 for a small number of concerts; the premiere of his own Piano Concerto followed on 4 February 1954, with the Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française. He died in Paris in 1956, aged sixty-five.

Nat’s central achievement on record is his traversal of all thirty-two Beethoven sonatas, made between 1951 and 1955. Recording the complete cycle was an unusual undertaking for a French pianist of his generation, and it is the body of work on which his reputation principally rests.

He was at least as consequential as a teacher. After 1937 he gave himself to his Conservatoire class and to composition, and his pupils included Jörg Demus, Geneviève Joy and Jacques Loussier, a spread of subsequent careers that says something about the breadth of what he taught. His own music has had a smaller afterlife, though the Piano Concerto premiered in February 1954 was the principal fruit of those later years and remains the work of his that is heard most.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Nat