Nina Milkina was born on January 27, 1919 to a Jewish family in
Moscow. Her father was a
portrait artist and her mother was a harpist. Aged seven, she began learning the piano with
Lev Conus and
Alexander Glazunov before moving with her family to Paris in 1926. When she was 11 years old she made her first public debut in Paris with the
Orchestre Lamoureux. That year she performed multiple works to Ralph Hawkes of Boosey & Hawkes, who later published some of them. A music critic at the time stated that her piece
My Toys was too difficult for a child to play, without being aware that Milkina had composed it aged 11. She also began regularly
soloing at the
National Gallery of London in recitals created by
Myra Hess. Around this time, she encountered her future husband, the then-soldier Alastair Sedgwick, after performing a concert in
Bournemouth. In the late 1940s, she became one of the first artists to perform on the BBC Third Programme, where she became well-known for her weekly
Mozart solos. Around this time the British music company
Boosey & Hawkes published many recording of her under an
anglicized version of her name,
Nina Milkin. In 1949, she joined a musical group set up by
Harry Blech along with
Denis Matthews,
Peter Schidlof and
Norbert Brainin among others. In 1968 she also began performing alongside the
Oromonte Piano Trio. She was diagnosed with
cancer in the 1980s, forcing her to stop touring and to only record music in a studio. She died at the age of 87 on November 29, 2006, in London. ==References==