Thomas Rajna, excitable pianist and composer who excelled in works by fellow Hungarians – obituary

Thomas Rajna, who has died aged 92, was a Hungarian-born pianist and composer who made his career in postwar London before settling in South Africa ;he gave an early British performance of a Bartók piano concerto, played twice at the Proms and heard his own music performed at the Cheltenham Festival.

A loud, energetic and sometimes irascible performer, he was sometimes compared with the British pianist John Ogdon on account of his enthusiastic approach to large scale works. His command of the keyboard was remarkably assured, though it was his gift as an interpreter, especially of music by fellow Hungarians such as Franz Liszt, that was most admired.

He could be single-minded, sometimes clashing with conductors. He recalled an explosive recording session with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by his compatriot Sir Georg Solti, who had already lost two pianists during stormy rehearsals. “He was red in the face and screaming at me,” recalled Rajna, adding that their argument continued in Hungarian. The disc, Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste, was eventually completed though possibly, he noted, because “Solti decided that he could not afford to lose a third pianist”.

He was born Tamás Rajna into a Jewish family in Budapest on December 21 1928, the younger of two sons of an opera-loving doctor and his wife. In the closing weeks of the war the family were in hiding but his father was betrayed to the Arrow Cross, Hungarian accomplices of the Nazis; his body, “probably tossed into the Danube”, was never found.

Rajna recalled that his piano teacher, Lili, “lavished infinite care over my musical education”. She thought nothing, however, of “[applying] a wooden spoon on my posterior if she thought I did not practice enough and spent too much time with my friends chasing around in our garden or climbing trees”.

During the Nazi occupation he was excluded from higher education. Yet one bitterly cold day in 1944 Lili smuggled him into the Liszt Academy of Music, keeping his hands warm with a bag of piping-hot roasted chestnuts procured from a street vendor. He astonished the professors with a thunderous account of Stravinsky’s Piano-Rag-Music that after the war ensured his admittance, when his teachers included Zoltán Kodály. In 1947 he was awarded the prestigious Liszt Prize.

Making his way to London later that year, Rajna anglicised his first name and resumed his studies at the Royal College of Music. During one college concert he performed Bartók’s Contrasts with the clarinettist (later conductor) Colin Davis and in another, in 1951, gave what was possibly the first London performance of Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Rajna enjoyed a respectable career at the keyboard, performing under conductors such as Otto Klemperer, Erich Leinsdorf and John Pritchard. At the 1961 Proms he was one of the four pianists in Stravinsky’s Les Noces; Janet Baker was one of the singers and the conductor was Davis who, “while gently curbing my Dionysian fervour … explained to the other somewhat put-out pianists that I was a fierce and excitable Hungarian”.

Meanwhile, Rajna’s own piano concerto was heard at the Camden Festival, while the English Chamber Orchestra gave the premiere of his Cantilenas and Interludes at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

At the BBC Studios in Maida Vale he met Stravinsky, whose piano music he had recorded, and after another concert ran into Messiaen, whose Vingt Regards he had also committed to disc. “He took my score and proceeded to write in painstakingly precise hand a message of thanks for my labours,” Rajna said.

In 1970 the pianist Lamar Crowson, who was working at the University of Cape Town, recruited Rajna to the South African College of Music. “I accepted the offer of the new position as I was tired of the vagaries of freelance existence in the UK,” he explained. Thereafter he rarely appeared here, although in 1990 he recorded the Schumann Piano Concerto with the BBC Philharmonic.

That year he took part in the first (and so far only) South African performance of Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony with the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra, with whom he often performed.

Rajna retired from academic life in 1993 but continued to compose, perform and record. His discs include a complete survey of piano works by the Spanish composer Enrique Granados, while his opera, Amarantha, was premiered in 2000 by Cape Town Opera.

As a young man he had been a keen chess player. He was also fond of swimming and in his seventies became a self-described “civic activist”, leading a campaign against multi-storey housing in his low-rise residential area of Western Cape.

Thomas Rajna is survived by his wife Ann, daughter of the English actor Gerald Campion, and by a son and two daughters; another son predeceased him.

Thomas Rajna, born December 21 1928, died July 16 2021