Phyllis Sellick

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

Life

Sellick was five years old his first piano lessons. Four years later she won a competition in the Daily Mirror for young musicians. She had two years 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 at the ballet classes and gave the early 1930s, their first concerts. In 1937 she married the pianist Cyril Smith, with whom, at the suggestion of Sir Henry Wood, first appeared at the Proms 1941 at the Royal Albert Hall.

To Seliks repertoire included the Classical and Romantic piano literature and on the basis of their studies in Paris ( where she had met Maurice Ravel ) French music. In addition, they 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, gave the world premiere of the First Piano Sonata by Michael Tippett, her devoted his Fantasia on a Theme of trade and took William Walton whose Symphonie Concertante on plate on.

Smith lost in 1956 due to a stroke, the use of the left hand. 1957 were Selik and Smith for the first time at the BBC as Three Hands piano on two pianos on. In subsequent 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 to be composed for her concert for piano for four hands on the dreihändige occupation, as well as edited Bliss his Concerto for Two Pianos. A total of twenty large and more than a hundred smaller works for the dreihändige duo have been processed. A few months before Smith's death in 1974, he and Cesar Franck's Sellik on Prelude, Chorale and Fugue.

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