| Biography | Kyla Greenbaum (born Brighton, England on 5 February 1922, died 15 June 2017) was a spirited British concert pianist with an 80-a-day cigarette smoking habit renowned for championing complex contemporary music after the Second World War. Greenbaum won a place in 1935 at Brighton School of Music and, aged 16, won the Nes Chonicle scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. She graduate din 1942, winning the Albanesi prize for her interpretation of Chopin, and later continued her studies in Budapest under Laszlo Lajtha.
Greenbaum gave the European premiere of Schoenberg's 'Piano Concerto' in 1945 and 1955 British premiere of Prokofiev's 'Piano Concerto No.2', one of the most virtuosic pieces in the repertoire. Her calling card was 'The Rio Grande'by Constant Lambert, a work infused with kazz and syncopated rhtyms that she performed at the Hall for her Proms debut in 1945 under Albert Sammons. In May 1945 she played in Myra Hess's wartime concert series at the National Gallery.
Greenbaum taught at the Royal Academy of Music and spent three years in Canada in the late 1970s. In 2006 the first performance of her 'Song of Songs' was heard at Jewish Cukture Day at the South Bank Centre, London.
Greenbaum married Terence Weil in her youth, and later in 1956 married Andrew Crowcroft, a psychiatrist, with whom she lived in Camden, North London. The couple had two children, Jonathan and Natasha.
Ardently political throughout her life, in her eighties she gave a firebrand lecture on 'feminism and atheism' at Conway Hall in London. |