Phyllis Sellick

Phyllis Doreen Sellick (born June 16, 1911 in Ilford , Essex , † May 26, 2007 in Kingston upon Thames , Surrey ) was an English pianist and music teacher .

Life

Sellick received his first piano lessons at the age of five. Four years later she won a Daily Mirror competition for young musicians. She had two years of private lessons with Cuthbert Whitemore and studied from 1925 to 1927 at the Royal Academy of Music in London, then at the Conservatoire de Paris with Isidore Philipp .

She first worked as a piano accompanist in ballet lessons and gave her first concerts in the early 1930s. In 1937 she married the pianist Cyril Smith , with whom, at the suggestion of Sir Henry Wood , she first appeared at the Proms in 1941 at the Royal Albert Hall .

Selik's repertoire included classical and romantic piano literature and, due to her studies in Paris (where she also met Maurice Ravel ), French music. She also played works by contemporary English composers such as Lennox Berkeley , Arthur Bliss , Alan Rawsthorne , Gordon Jacob and Malcolm Arnold . She was friends with Ralph Vaughan Williams , played the world premiere of Michael Tippett's First Piano Sonata , which he dedicated to his Fantasia on a Theme of Handel , and recorded his Symphony Concertante with William Walton .

In 1956 Smith lost the use of his left hand as a result of a stroke. In 1957, Selik and Smith first appeared on the BBC as a three-hand piano duo on two pianos. In the following years Gordon Jacob and Malcolm Arnold wrote works for the duo: Malcolm's Concerto For Phyllis And Cyril was premiered with great success at the Proms in 1969. Berkeley adapted the concerto for piano four hands he had composed for her to the three-hand instrumentation, and Bliss also arranged his concerto for two pianos. A total of twenty large and more than a hundred smaller works were arranged for the three-hand duo. A few months before Smith's death in 1974, he and Sellik recorded César Franck's prelude, chorale and fugue .

After Smith's death, Sellick worked with the pianist Terence Beckles , but concentrated mainly on teaching at the Royal College of Music , where she had been a professor of piano since 1964. She taught here - despite increasing blindness and although she could no longer use her left hand after a fracture - up to a stroke one year before her death.

literature

• Cyril Smith: Duet for Three Hands. Angus & Robertson, 1958

Individual evidence