Nina Milkina

Nina Milkina was a Russian pianist from Moscow. She began practicing piano when she was young alongside multiple prominent pianists and composers of the time. She was one of the first performers to appear on the BBC Third Programme, during which she regularly performed Mozart solos.

Life and career

Nina Milkina was born on January 27, 1919, in Moscow, Soviet Union. Her father was a portrait artist and her mother was a harpist. When she was young she began learning how to play the piano with composers and pianists Leon Conus and Alexander Glazunov. When she was 11 she made her first public debut in Paris with the Orchestre Lamoureux. That same year she performed multiple works to Ralph Hawkes of Boosey & Hawkes, who later published some of them. A music critic at the time stated that her piece My Toys was too difficult for a child to play, without being aware that the writer Milkina was 11 years old at the time it was composed. Around the 1930s she moved to London to live with other family members, where throughout the decade she studied with Harold Craxton alongside Myra Hess. In 1943 while Milkina was still in London, both of her parents were deported to Germany and later died in a Nazi concentration camp.
As Milkina was studying in London, the Second World War began in 1939. Milkina began frequently touring areas where soldiers were stationed and performed for them. She also began regularly soloing at the National Gallery of London in recitals created by Myra Hess. Around this time she encountered her future husband Alastair Sedgwick after performing a concert in Bournemouth. In the 1940s she began a weekly series of solos of songs by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on the former British radio show BBC Third Programme. She was one of the first artists to perform on the program at the time. In 1949, she joined a musical group set up by Harry Blech along with Denis Matthews, Peter Schidlof and Norbert Brainin among others. Between 1951 and 1978 she gave 16 performances in Scotland while touring with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
During the 1980s Milkina was diagnosed with cancer, forcing her to stop touring and to only record music in a studio. In 1991, it caused her to end her career as a pianist. She remained a teacher to some of her remaining students including Leon McCawley and Murray Perahia throughout the 1990s. She died at the age of 87 on November 29, 2006, in London.