Thomas Rajna

Thomas Rajna (21 December 1928 – 16 July 2021) was a British pianist and composer of Hungarian birth. He had been domiciled in Cape Town in South Africa since 1970. Biography Rajna was born in Budapest, Hungary. He started to play the piano and compose at an early age and studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music where he won the Liszt Prize in 1947. That year he left Hungary to settle in London and enrolled at the Royal College of Music. He soon appeared at the Proms under such conductors as Carlo Maria Giulini, Colin Davis and John Pritchard, also becoming a frequent broadcaster at the BBC. In 1963 he was appointed Professor of Piano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His first commercial recording was the complete piano solo works of Igor Stravinsky. After that he recorded music by Alexander Scriabin, Robert Schumann and Olivier Messiaen, the piano part of Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka with the New Philharmonia under Erich Leinsdorf, and Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta with Sir Georg Solti and the London Symphony Orchestra. He completed a cycle of recordings devoted to the entire piano music of Enrique Granados. Subsequently he undertook to recor