Opinion | Celebrating pianist Valerie Tryon at 90

“Looking back now, honestly, I don’t know how I did it,” she says.

Updated Oct. 10, 2024

The Ancaster Music Society and the McMaster University Library are presenting “A Life in Music — Valerie Tryon at 90” 

on Oct. 17 in the Ancaster Memorial Arts Centre. Photo: Valerie Tryon

by Leonard Turnevicius Contributing Columnist

Leonard Turnevicius writes about classical music for the Hamilton Spectator

The secret’s out.

There’s no hiding her age any longer.

Valerie Tryon has just turned 90. And to celebrate that milestone, the Ancaster Music Society and the McMaster University Library are presenting “A Life in Music — Valerie Tryon at 90” on Thursday, Oct. 17 at 7 p.m. in the Ancaster Memorial Arts Centre, 357 Wilson St. E.

That evening, the Portsmouth, England-born, Ancaster-based Tryon will be chatting about her life and 80-plus-year career on stage with Daniel Vnukowski, concert pianist and on-air host at the New Classical FM. During their conversation, Tryon will perform roughly 50 minutes of music, short pieces by Chopin, Liszt, Ravel and others, chosen specifically to underscore certain parts of her outstanding career.

After participating in the 1956 International Liszt Piano Competition in Budapest, Valerie Tryon was heard regularly on the BBC, performed up and down England, and toured with the London Philharmonic. Photo: Gary Yokoyama

And yes, as usual, she will perform all of these pieces from memory.

Afterward, McMaster will host a reception for the audience, complete with cupcakes and balloons. A portrait of Tryon by Dundas artist Lorne Toews, commissioned by an anonymous donor, will also be unveiled and later hung in the theatre.

So, where did it all start for her?

“It’s so far back I can’t remember,” chuckled Tryon.

Was it her life’s ambition to be an internationally acclaimed concert pianist?

“No, not at all,” said Tryon.

OK then, what exactly was she thinking way back when?

“I wasn’t thinking anything,” deadpanned the ever-modest Tryon. “It just happened to me. I was little and I played and I loved playing.”

And she also sang — so well, that her family thought she was destined for a career as a singer.

“I actually enjoyed that,” said Tryon. “I used to sing very high when I was little. And I sang all kinds of things, like ‘Caro nome’ (a soprano aria from Verdi’s opera, ‘Rigoletto’).”

In 1941, Tryon, then seven, made a private recording in Leeds of her singing Mendelssohn’s “On the Wings of Song,” accompanied by her talented mum, Iris, at the piano, as well as playing a piano etude by Stephen Heller. The 78-r.p.m. disc was then sent to Egypt as a souvenir for her dad, Kenneth, who was serving with the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. That disc has since been digitized and was placed in the Valerie Tryon fonds at McMaster University.

Iris Tryon, who incidentally was no stranger to the stage — she appeared in a couple of movies, performed with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company and sang as a contralto in performances of Bach’s “B Minor Mass,” “St. John Passion” and Handel’s oratorio “Samson” — certainly paid no heed to Noël Coward’s 1935 hit in which he crooned sardonically, “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington.”

Tryon made her first public appearance, aged nine, on March 18, 1944, in the Royal Hall, Harrogate, North Yorkshire. Billed as “Vallee Tryon,” she performed American songwriter-arranger-dance band leader Newell Chase’s “Midnight in Mayfair” and Chopin’s “Waltz in D-flat Major” op. 64 no. 1.

She gave her first full public recital the following year in Banbury Town Hall, performing piano works by Liszt and Chopin. Further recitals in the same venue followed.

Her repertoire broadened to include more modern works, such as preludes by Lennox Berkeley, Dmitry Kabalevsky’s “Sonata in C Major,” and Francis Poulenc’s “Toccata,” the latter which she’ll perform at the AMAC.

At London’s Royal Academy of Music, Tryon scooped up prize after prize, graduating at 19 in 1954 with the RAM Gold Medal. A Boise Scholarship enabled her to study with Jacques Février in Paris.

Her reputation grew such that she auditioned for two of England’s finest musicians of the day, composer Benjamin Britten and his life partner, tenor Peter Pears.

“At the Royal Court Theatre (in London’s Sloane Square), they had these auditions for young people and I went,” recalled Tryon. “Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears were the people who were choosing. And I was nervous, of course. But they were so delightful and so friendly and so lovely. I didn’t feel nervous. They were just lovely. I couldn’t have been more than 18, I think, or 19.”

After participating in the 1956 International Liszt Piano Competition in Budapest, Tryon was heard regularly on the BBC, appeared several times at the BBC Proms, performed up and down England, and toured with the London Philharmonic.

After moving to Canada, she taught at McMaster and continued to perform as a solo artist throughout North America and her native England as well as in various chamber formations such as Camerata, Trio Canada, the Rembrandt Trio, Jack Mendelsohn’s chamberWORKS!, and a piano-flute duo with Hamilton’s Suzanne Shulman.

Her archived fonds at McMaster give a glimpse of but a fraction of her concert and recording activities over the course of eight decades.

“Looking back now, honestly, I don’t know how I did it,” said Tryon. “It was so intense and I had to be so on the ball. And I couldn’t afford to make any mistakes doing a Proms concert or a live BBC concert. Totally nerve-racking, really.”

Nowadays, Tryon is limiting herself to teaching a handful of piano students at Redeemer University and performing locally.

“I don’t feel much like travelling around playing, to tell you the truth, I don’t really,” said Tryon. “I’m feeling that I’m playing OK right now. I don’t think I’ve lost my technique, although I broke my wrist (several years ago), but I’ve substituted lots of things for that (such as re-fingering some left-hand passages in certain pieces). And probably, I think I’ve got more expressive powers now because I don’t feel restrained anymore.”

So, the inner “fire” is still burning.

“I still love music, of course I do,” added Tryon. “I love everything, actually, in life. I’m grateful for it because you know so many people my age, they don’t have their health. I’m grateful for all that, very grateful.”

First published at The Hamilton Spectator, October 10, 2024