| Biography | Nina Milkina was born in Moscow on January 27 1919. Her father, Jacques, was an artist and a friend of Chagall, and had drawn Mussorgsky and Prokofiev; her mother, Sophie, was a harpist. When Nina was seven the family, like many artistic Russians, moved to Paris.
There she studied with her compatriots Leon Conus and Alexander Glazunov. She also played for Rachmaninov. Later, in London, she took lessons with Tobias Matthay and Harold Craxton.
Her first public concert was in Paris at the age of 11 with the Orchestra Lamoureux. Later that year she met Ralph Hawkes, of the publisher Boosey & Hawkes in London, and he began to publish some of her own compositions under the name Nina Milkin, notably the two fairy tales known as My Toys. The journal Music & Letters commented at the time: "These, as the work of a very young composer, show promise. The first are diffuse. The second, by far the best." There was also a Marche-Burlesque for piano, which proved popular in the late 1930s.
Nina Milkina had settled permanently in London in the late 1920s, living initially with her grandfather and an aunt. She later took part in the wartime National Gallery concerts organised by Myra Hess.
For a while she lived in a flat in Belsize Avenue above her friend and colleague Clifford Curzon, who was also a pupil of Matthay. She enjoyed many long friendships, including one with the cellist Eleanor Warren whom, in 1944, she accompanied on a particularly hazardous tour to the Russian fleet in Scapa Flow. In 1958 she gave the first performance of London Sketches by Donald Swann and Sebastian Shaw.
Nina Milkina was generous in her support of younger musicians, and served on the jury of the Leeds International Piano Competition in 1981. The young British pianist Leon McCawley, the runner-up at Leeds in 1993, was one of her more recent protégés.
He has made a particular point of playing her cadenzas, of which she wrote several for concertos by both Haydn and Mozart. Nina Milkina stressed to him the importance of lyricism in his playing. "She always told me to 'taste the keys'," he recalled. His recent recording of the complete Mozart piano sonatas owed much to Nina Milkina's encouragement.
Her last major performance was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1990, when she played the piano concerto No 27 in B flat (K595) at a concert to mark the anniversary of Mozart's birth.
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