Cyril Smith (pianist) - Performing

Performing

From 1926 to 1930 Cyril Smith studied with Herbert Fryer (a student of Tobias Matthay and Ferruccio Busoni) at the Royal College of Music, winning medals and prizes including the Daily Express piano contest in 1928 and made his concert début in Birmingham in 1929. He performed as an off-screen piano accompanist in several of the 30-line Baird system television broadcasts of 1935 and joined the BBC when they took over. It was at the BBC's early television studios that he met his future second wife, the pianist Phyllis Sellick. In 1934 Smith left the BBC to take up an appointment as professor of pianoforte at the Royal College of Music. Smith and Sellick married in 1937, pursuing solo careers. During the Second World War Cyril Smith performed concerts for ENSA but in 1941 he and his wife began performing together as a piano duo at the Proms, and made many international concert tours for ENSA and the British Council. In 1945 they toured the Far East, where the hazards to contend with included small animals lodged in pianos and out-of-tune instruments.

Smith's work was largely from the Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Schubert, Balakirev, and Albéniz repertoire. Malcolm Arnold, Sir Arthur Bliss, Gordon Jacob and Ralph Vaughan Williams also wrote music for the duo. Among Cyril Smith's many performances were appearances at The Barn Theatre, Oxted, in the 1930s and at the Proms in 1930, 1937, 1941, 1944, 1946, 1953 and 1969.

In 1956 while in the city of Kharkov in Ukraine at the start of a concert tour of the Soviet Union he suffered a thrombosis and stroke which paralysed his left arm; however, with music arranged by themselves, or written or arranged by composer friends, Smith and Sellick were able to continue to perform three-handed music concerts as a piano duo. Notable among the works composed for them was Malcolm Arnold's Concerto for Two Pianos (3 hands), Op. 104, dedicated to the performers, who premiered it at the Proms in 1969 and recorded it in 1970.