Thomas Rajna (21 December 1928 – 16 July 2021)[1] was a British pianist and composer of Hungarian birth. He had been domiciled inCape Town in South Africa since 1970.
Rajna was born inBudapest,Hungary. He started to play the piano and compose at an early age and studied at theFranz Liszt Academy of Music where he won the Liszt Prize in 1947. That year he left Hungary to settle in London and enrolled at theRoyal College of Music. He soon appeared atthe Proms under such conductors asCarlo Maria Giulini,Colin Davis andJohn Pritchard, also becoming a frequent broadcaster at theBBC. In 1963 he was appointed Professor of Piano at theGuildhall School of Music and Drama.
His first commercial recording was the complete piano solo works ofIgor Stravinsky. After that he recorded music byAlexander Scriabin,Robert Schumann andOlivier Messiaen, the piano part of Igor Stravinsky'sPetrushka with the New Philharmonia underErich Leinsdorf, andBéla Bartók'sMusic for Strings, Percussion and Celesta with SirGeorg Solti and theLondon Symphony Orchestra. He completed a cycle of recordings devoted to the entire piano music ofEnrique Granados. Subsequently he undertook to recordFranz Liszt's 12Transcendental Etudes and12 Etudes, Op. 1. Rajna often performed his own two piano concertos.
He settled with his family in Cape Town, South Africa in 1970 to take up an appointment at the Faculty of Music of theUniversity of Cape Town (UCT), where he became associate professor of piano in 1989. In January 1981 he was awarded a University Fellowship by UCT and the same year received an Artes Award from theSouth African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) for his series of radio programmes on Franz Liszt, entitled "A Lisztian Metamorphosis". He completed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1984. The following year he received a doctorate in music from UCT in recognition of his body of compositions.
During a 1990 visit to England he recorded theSchumannPiano Concerto with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and gave a recital of works by Ernő Dohnányi and himself. During the same year Rajna played the solo piano part in the first, and so far the only South African performance of Messiaen's monumentalTurangalîla-Symphonie with theCape Town Symphony Orchestra. His 1990 Harp Concerto had its European première inCopenhagen at the Fifth World Harp Congress in July 1993. This work and his Second Piano Concerto (with Rajna as soloist) were recorded by the National Symphony Orchestra of the SABC and released on CD in 1993. At the end of that year he retired from his post at the UCT College of Music.
His very first commercial recording, Stravinsky's complete solo piano works, which Rajna recorded in 1963, and which had been unavailable for 30 years, re-entered international circulation after the Dutch label, Emergo Classics, released their digitally remastered version in their Saga Classics series in 1993. In 1994 he completedVideo Games for Orchestra and his operaAmarantha. The former Foundation for the Creative Arts commissioned these works as well as theRhapsody for Clarinet and Orchestra (1995), premièred byRobert Pickup, the NSO and Richard Cock in 1996. In the same year Rajna was a recipient of the UCT Book Award for his Harp Concerto. This annual award is given in recognition of outstanding contribution to any branch of learning and it was the first time that a musical composition was thus honoured. In 1997 Rajna received the Molteno Award for lifetime achievement from theCape Tercentenary Foundation.
Rajna'sFantasy for Violin and Orchestra (1996), commissioned by the thenNatal Philharmonic Orchestra, was premièred inDurban in 1998. Lyon and Healy Harps of Chicago commissioned hisSuite for Violin and Harp for presentation at the Seventh World Harp Congress in Prague in July 1999.Anna Verkholantseva, winner of the 1997 Moscow international Harp Competition, who premiered this work inPrague, has since then made a CD of it and has given performances of the "Suite" with her violinist partner,Alexander Trostiansky, in Moscow, London, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. The operaAmarantha was premiered in November 2000 by Cape Town Opera in conjunction with the UCT Opera School.
In 2001 Rajna created his own CD label, Amarantha Records. His catalogue includes his performance of Goyescas by Granados, music by fellow Hungarian Dohnanyi, Messiaen's complete "Vingt regards", Bartok's 2nd and 3rd Piano Concertos, concertos by Schumann and Barber, Brahms' 2nd Piano Concerto, music by Scriabin and a selection of Rajna's representative compositions. The same year Rajna wroteTarantulla for violin and piano in response to a commission for the 2002 Pretoria contest by the University of South Africa (Unisa) International String Competition. The Cape Town premiere ofVideo Games by the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by David de Villiers took place in August 2002 to public and critical acclaim. International violin virtuoso Mikhail Ovrutsky, who was the winner of the 2002 Pretoria string competition and who had performed Rajna'sTarantulla on that occasion, came to Cape Town to perform Rajna'sFantasy for Violin and Orchestra in May 2004. Rajna'sHarp Concerto had its Swiss premiere inBasel in September 2004.
Rajna's recordings of the complete piano works of Spanish composerEnrique Granados (1867-1916), made in London forCRD in 1976, were reissued in 2004 on six CDs in a box set and distributed worldwide byBrilliant Classics. In 2007 these recordings were reissued byCDR on seven CDs which can be bought individually. Between 2002 and 2004 Rajna completed another opera,Valley Song, based on the play byAthol Fugard. The premiere took place at the Spier Summer Arts Festival,Stellenbosch, in March 2005 and in 2007 the opera was revived at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival inOudtshoorn, where it gained prizes in two categories: best musical show and most promising newcomer (Golda Schultz, soprano, the opera's leading lady).
In 2006 he completedThe Creation-A Negro Sermon for chorus and orchestra, written for the First Cape Town International Summer Music Festival in 2006. Rajna'sPiano Preludes are part of the syllabus for the Teachers' Licentiate of Unisa. In response to a commission by Unisa to write a set piece for the new Grade 7 Piano Examination Album he completed his Oriental Feast in August 2006. His Violin Concerto (2007) premiered in October 2010 at theUniversity of Stellenbosch.
In the course of celebrating Rajna's 80th birthday the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra performed extracts fromValley Song in a concert during the Third Cape Town International Summer Music Festival in November 2008. Rajna himself was the soloist in his 2nd Piano Concerto. Rajna prepared and reissued on his label a series of his landmark recordings of earlier vintage, now digitally remastered and available on CD for the first time. He releasedBrahms'sB flat major and Schumann's A minor piano concertos, Liszt'sTranscendental Studies coupled with their earliest version, the12 Etudes, Op. 1, and Messiaen'sVingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus. In the pipeline are piano concertos by Bartók, Stravinsky, Prokofiev andBarber,Bachharpsichord concertos and music by Scriabin and Dohnanyi.
Rajna died at the age of 92 in a hospital in Cape Town on 16 July 2021.[2]
Poems used by kind permission of Curtis Brown Ltd., London, on behalf of the Estate of W. H. Auden, the copyright holders.
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