Edna Iles

Pianist and champion of Medtner

Edna Amy Iles, pianist: born King's Heath, Warwickshire 18 May 1905; died Solihull, Warwickshire 29 January 2003.

Composers sometimes hang on to public attention by the slenderest of means; for Nicolai Medtner, for several decades, the pianist Edna Iles was that thread. That he is now often spoken of in the same breath as his friend Sergei Rachmaninov and features regularly in recitals and recordings is a tribute to her perspicacity and tenacity.

A child prodigy, Iles first played in public at the age of nine, in a benefit concert for the Belgian Relief Fund in January 1915. She was all of 15 by the time of her professional début, playing the Liszt First Concerto with the City of Birmingham Orchestra. An ambitious recital at the Wigmore Hall a few months after her Birmingham début drew praise from the London critics. And two years later, aged 17, she performed the Third Rachmaninov Concerto, the first British player to do so; the work itself was only eight years old.

In the early years of her career she was a big name, with a strong and muscular technique. In the 1920s and 1930s she played under conductors as prominent as Sir Adrian Boult, Sir Thomas Beecham and Willem Mengelberg, with whom she toured the British Isles as part of a London Symphony Orchestra celebrity series, alongside Ignace Paderewski and the soprano Amelita Galli-Curci. She toured abroad, too – Amsterdam, Berlin, Budapest, Oslo, Paris, Stockholm, Vienna – enjoying considerable success in an age when formidable pianists were hardly in short supply.

Her encounter with Medtner's music had come very early, even before the Soviet revolution had driven the composer from his homeland, when her piano teacher had set her his Idylle, Op 7, to learn. As a student she explored and performed several of his larger works. It was when she took the First Concerto into her repertoire in 1928 that she was emboldened to write and ask for the composer's advice; although he was then based in Paris, he was going to be playing in London. He asked her to come backstage after his concert and they arranged that she should play for him a few days later. It was the beginning of a relationship that would change both lives.

Medtner, an unworldly character who lived only for his music, settled in London in 1935; when the Blitz started, he complained to Iles that the noise and disruption made it impossible to compose and so she asked him and his wife, Anna, to come and join her and her parents in their house in the countryside outside Birmingham. In the evenings, she would help him with his English pronunciation, reading Shakespeare, Galsworthy, Shaw and other writers with him. Occasionally she would prepare some of his songs and sing them with the composer at the piano. If he was too tired for work or music, they would play cards, sometimes accompanied by the sound of the bombs pounding the city close by. When the bombing forced a move, the Ileses took a house in the village of Wootton Wawen, in Warwickshire, six miles from Stratford, and the Medtners came, too.

His stay with the Iles family was extended by the time required to recover from a heart attack; then, after two and a half years, he felt he had to return to London. Iles often came to play with him, performing the orchestral part of the then new Third Concerto when the composer performed it in a private concert chez Myra Hess.

When Medtner accompanied Oda Slobodskaya in a selection of his songs in one of Hess's wartime National Gallery concerts, he asked Iles to complete the programme with some of his solo-piano pieces. She was determined to perform all three Medtner Piano Concertos in London after the war had ended, and realised her amibition early in 1946, appearing in three Albert Hall concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra. As a token of his gratitude for her efforts on behalf of his music, Medtner dedicated to Iles his Round Dance for two pianos, Op 58, No 1, and inscribed her copy "to the bravest and ablest besieger of my musical fortresses".

Another composer who raised his hat to Iles's instinctive musicianship and virtuoso technique was Ernest Bloch, whose Concerto Symphonique she revived in 1955, attracting an excited response from its creator:

I was profoundly shaken by your extraordinary comprehension and realisation, as a musician and as a great pianist! Now I know there is one, you, who can reveal this enormous rhapsody. . . Here and there there was a slight discrepancy with my own interpretation, but it was always so musical, so logical, so instinctively felt – what cannot be taught! – that you must have the liberty to feel as you did.

Two years later, Iles recorded Malcolm Arnold's Variations on a Ukrainian Theme and he, too, was impressed: "To take a new work like that, and play it like that, well, I don't know anyone else who could do it!" She continued to programme new music by composers she believed in, giving the first performance of Alan Bush's Variations, Nocturne and Finale on an English Sea Song in 1958.

Iles was a frequent broadcaster for the BBC after the war. Richard Butt, the producer of her last BBC recital, in 1979, found her technique still "very big and beefy", though she was by then in her mid- seventies, and the following year she played in a concert celebrating Medtner's centenary.

For all the vigour of her keyboard manner, Iles was a very shy woman who never married, perhaps because of the influence of a domineering mother. She made only a handful of recordings, and those were mostly private.

Martin Anderson