Eileen Joyce - The complete studio recordings

[Barbirollians]

Did anyone else get this Eloquence box ? As I try and reduce the number of unplayed box sets I have just started on it. The first CD includes a particularly fine Mozart K576 . I know her really as an Australian pianist who after hitting the heights disappeared from view and seemed to have gone into some form of mental decline.

Anyone know much more about her or even heard her play ?

[gradus]

I remember her from my childhood, didn't Saga have a Greig pf conc from her under the baton of George Hurst?

[Bryn]

Did anyone else get this Eloquence box ? As I try and reduce the number of unplayed box sets I have just started on it. The first CD includes a particularly fine Mozart K576 . I know her really as an Australian pianist who after hitting the heights disappeared from view and seemed to have gone into some form of mental decline.

Anyone know much more about her or even heard her play ?

I'm too lazy (and sitting on a bench in a little green in Beaconsfield, wait to attend a dental appointment) to check for myself but does the set include the John Ireland piano concerto?

[Ah. I see from the Presto Classical listing that it does. I will order from Europadisc, however: https://www.europadisc.co.uk/classic...SABEgLbgvD_BwE]

[Mandryka]

Did anyone else get this Eloquence box ? As I try and reduce the number of unplayed box sets I have just started on it. The first CD includes a particularly fine Mozart K576 . I know her really as an Australian pianist who after hitting the heights disappeared from view and seemed to have gone into some form of mental decline.

Anyone know much more about her or even heard her play ?

She's very good in solo Grieg! I haven't heard her on Eloquence but I have the APR transfers.

Can't remember the Mozart but I'll play it later.

[edashtav]

I remember her from my childhood, didn't Saga have a Greig pf conc from her under the baton of George Hurst?

I recall Eileen Joyce playing the Grieg concerto confidently with the Bournemoth Symphony Orchestra.

[rauschwerk]

Mental decline? No, no! At a certain point she decided that pursuing a career as a public performer would drive her mad, but she continued playing. She made recordings of Bach multi-harpsichord concerti with Raymond Leppard and other illuminati. All this is very movingly described by Bryce Morrison in the notes to the APR set of her earlier solo recordings. She was a wonderful artist.

[Barbirollians]

Mental decline? No, no! At a certain point she decided that pursuing a career as a public performer would drive her mad, but she continued playing. She made recordings of Bach multi-harpsichord concerti with Raymond Leppard and other illuminati. All this is very movingly described by Bryce Morrison in the notes to the APR set of her earlier solo recordings. She was a wonderful artist.

Thanks - BM’s notes to this set suggest overwhelming stage fright led to her retirement and horrors of a comeback.

[Barbirollians]

Today I have enjoyed both her rather mutilated version of the Tchaikovsky 2 - with cuts even beyond Siloti , but a performance of fizz and charm and her Rachmaninov 2 with Leinsdorf - quite a bit of hiss on this but with much of the open hearted playing from the Brief encounter soundtrack - in a Gramophone review of a reissue Lionel Sslter put the boot into this as hammy and a travesty . Very unfair I think .

[Barbirollians]

The Grieg concerto is later with the Royal Danish orchestra and Frandsen. Produced by the notorious Barrington Coupe who apparently bankrupted Saga. A cinematic reading but one can hear in it the charisma of her playing and why it would have been so attractive to 1940s and 50s audiences .

[smittims]

A rather good if old film , 'wherever she goes', was on TPTV recently, purporting to tell the early life and 'road to success' of Eileen Joyce.

If accurate (and one can never tell with old biopics) she had an extremely hard struggle even to learn the piano to begin with, let alone achieve recognition. Not for her the comfortable middle-class surburban home with a grand piano and money to pay for the best teachers. Her family are shown living in extreme poverty in the spoil heaps of gold mines in remote Western Australia, and the only piano an old upright in a school room which she was initially forbidden to touch. If this is true I think it makes her achievement all the more remarkable.