Peter Katin

Died: March 19, 2015

Peter Katin, who has died aged 84, was the British pianist who in the 1950s seemed on the brink of an illustrious career when he played Brahms's massive D minor Piano Concerto with the Scottish National Orchestra in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

His trills in the opening movement were like flashes of lightning. The music erupted in the Usher Hall on that memorable Friday night as it had never erupted there before, and on Saturday in Glasgow, they said it was even more intense. Thin and wiry, with fingers of steel, he was - exclaimed one Scottish critic of the period - the great white hope among British pianists.

In succeeding years, his fame expanded. In Rachmaninov's Third Piano Concerto he was no less sensational. Yet he was no mere pile driver. His Chopin playing, as a series of LP recordings confirmed, was a miracle of delicacy. His contributions to the London proms never failed to impress.

Then suddenly he seemed not to be around much any more. A reappearance in Scotland in the 1960s prompted one critic - a different one - to recall his glory days. Was he still as good as he had seemed? Well, maybe. Given the benefit of the doubt, the still youthful pianist wrote a letter to the critic in question saying it was mostly a matter of conductors. Some of them were inspiring. Most of them were not.

He seemed to be growing increasingly prickly. For a while he moved to Canada as professor of piano at the University of Western Ontario, but by 1984 he was back. By then, he said, the musical scene in Britain had completely changed, and not for the better. Frozen out of the concert schedules that had originally favoured him, he found himself having to subsidise his own appearances.

His musical liaison with the pianist and medium, Rosemary Brown, in the 1960s probably did little to develop his own career, though it resulted in a Philips recording by him of pieces which Schubert and Brahms, among other great composers, had supposedly dictated to Brown from beyond the grave.

Born in London, Peter Katin was the son of a Lithuanian sign painter and was educated at the Henry Thornton School in Clapham before studying at the Royal Academy of Music under Harold Craxton, although he declared later that he learnt more from studying privately with Clifford Curzon than in the five years he spent at the Academy.

He was also a much admired head chorister at Westminster Abbey. In 1958 he was among the first British pianists to appear in Moscow, at a time when he was establishing himself on the international circuit. But as he matured he grew to dislike the big-time career he had initially enjoyed and preferred to concentrate on a more personal repertoire.

He was married to Eva Zweig, also a pianist, by whom he had two sons who survive him. After a period of separation, he and Eva were divorced in 1988. He was a supporter of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, which famously provoked the town of Tonbridge Wells into cancelling a concert he was to have given there in 1974.

CONRAD WILSON