Kyla Greenbaum was a Britishpianist and composer, the younger sister of conductor and composer Hyam Greenbaum. She gave the first UK performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto in 1945 and the first of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto in 1955. Greenbaum was born in 1922 in Brighton, England to Polish parents and she received her first musical training at home. She went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music and then in Budapest. She first attracted notice as a pianist during the second world war as a regular performer at the famous National Gallery wartime lunchtime concerts organised by Myra Hess. The grand piano she owned for many years afterwards was scratched when the ceiling collapsed on it as she was hiding underneath during a German bombing raid. Her evident virtuosity quickly led to performances of challenging and otherwise neglected romantic and contemporary music repertoire, such as Liszt's Piano Concerto No 2 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Constant Lambert on 5 May 1945, and the first broadcast performance of Hindemith's Quartet for clarinet, violin, cello and piano. On 17 February 1948 Greenbaum debuted Alan Bush's Le Quatorze Juillet. Other contemporary works she championed were James Iliff's Piano Sonata, John Lambert's Piano Sonata and John Greenwood's Piano Quintet. She also performed Schoenberg's Phantasy, Op. 47, On 28 August 1945, aged just 23, Greenbaum made the first of 13 appearances as a soloist at the BBC Proms with a performance of Constant Lambert's The Rio Grande. It became her calling card, with Lambert saying that he preferred her interpretation to that of Hamilton Harty who premiered the piece in 1929.. She followed this on 7 September 1945 with the first performance in England of Schoenberg's Piano Concerto, Basil Cameron conducting. Despite some underlying hostility the work was received by the audience with unexpected enthusiasm, and she played with "immense courage". Other Proms appearances included William Walton's Sinfonia Concertante, John Ireland's Legend for piano and orchestra, Alan Rawsthorne's Piano Concerto No 1,, and the first UK hearing of Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2, by then 40 years old. In 1956 Greenbaum was one of three pianists performing Peter Racine Fricker's Concertante for three pianos, strings and percussion. Her best known recordings include The Rio Grande and Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor. These were both reissued in 2017 on the CRQ label. Greenbaum turned to composition in later life. She wrote a score for the play with dance Theresa by Julia Pascal, one of a trilogy of plays under the general title The Holocaust Trilogy, staged at the New End Theatre in Hampstead on 5 November 1995. Bells was composed in 1998. Song of Songs, a setting of the Old Testament, is scored for solo soprano with clarinet, horn, string trio, double bass and percussion. It received its first performance in 2006 as part of Jewish Culture Day at the Southbank Centre in London.
Personal life
In 1956, Greenbaum married psychiatrist Andrew Crowcroft, They had two children. Andrew's posting to Toronto effectively ended Kyla's career as a pianist, but in 1978 they returned to the UK, living in Camden for twenty years, throwing parties for exiles, writers and musicians. Kyla did occasionally still perform during this time, sometimes under her married name, both in Canada and in the UK. For instance, on the 12 May 1979 she premiered the piano work Noospheres by the Canadian composer Charles Camilleri at Canada House. She was co-authoring a book on the lullaby with her husband at the time of his death in 2002. It remained unpublished. Kyla died in Hampstead, London on 15 June 2017.
