Eileen Joyce
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Eileen Joyce (born: circa 1912 in Zeehan, Tasmania, Australia, died: 25 March 1991) was an Australian pianist.
Eileen Alannah Joyce was born to an Irish father and a Spanish mother in a tent in a mining town. Despite their poverty, her parents encouraged her musical development. Percy Grainger and Wilhelm Backhaus were impressed by her talent and encouraged her to study in Europe. The people of Western Australia contributed to her studies by holding fundraisers to enable her to travel to Germany. In the 1920s she studied at the Leipzig Conservatoire under Artur Schnabel, and at the Royal College of Music in London under Tobias Matthay.
In 1930 she made her debut in London at a Henry Wood promenade concert and went on to perform with the leading orchestras of Europe and the rest of the world.
Eileen Joyce contributed to the soundtracks of many films, and is still remembered as the soloist in the Rachmaninoff second piano concerto used to great effect in David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945).
In the days of her greatest fame, the critical climate was still stuffy, and her mass appeal and her succession of glamorous frocks provoked snobbish reaction and led to her being underrated musically. Her surviving recordings show that such patronising judgments were misplaced: she was a fine musician and a technically admirable pianist. Modern virtuoso pianists such as Stephen Hough have expressed amazement that she is not more highly rated amongst great 20th century pianists.
