Moura Lympany, who died March 28 at age 88, was one of the most colorful and popular of concert pianists, with audiences throughout the world during a career that extended uninterrupted for more than 65 years; though chiefly associated with the romantic repertory, she also championed several contemporary concertos.

Her agent once described her as “never late, not temperamental, and with wonderful vitality. She never dropped her standards in any way.” She herself said she played best after a good night’s sleep and a good steak.

She divided her time between London, Monaco, and her Pyrenean home at Rasigueres in Languedoc. She went to Rasigueres in 1973 when, after losing her voice through tiredness, she was advised to go somewhere hot and dry to rest. She bought a sheepfold and converted it into a tiny home. She also owned a vineyard that produced up to 15,000 bottles a year.

In 1981 she founded a week’s idyllic “festival of music and wine” in Rasigueres. This was an annual event until 1992. The Manchester Camerata played every year and singers such as Victoria de Los Angeles and Elizabeth Harwood, the pianist Cecile Ousset, and the mouth-organ player Larry Adler, among other famous names, were happy to perform there.

She played concertos with the Camerata – often Mozart, of which she gave beautiful performances, though with 19th-century cadenzas, which were no longer the fashion. In Languedoc and in London, she created gardens profuse with flowers and shrubs. One of the villagers at Rasigueres remarked: “If Madame sees one inch of bare earth, she will fill it.”

Moura Lympany was born Mary Johnstone at Cornwall, England, on August 18, 1916. Her father was an Army officer who found it difficult to settle into civilian life after World War I and was often away from home. Her mother, who gave her first piano lessons, spoke seven languages and taught piano and cello. She had been a governess at St. Petersburg before 1914.

Mary was sent to a Belgian convent when she was six years old. Her talent was noticed and she studied in Liege. She won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London, and just before her 13th birthday premiered with an orchestra, playing the Mendelssohn G minor concerto. The conductor, Basil Cameron, advised her to glamorize her name. She converted Mary into Moura and her mother’s maiden name of Limpenny was adapted as Lympany to rhyme with timpani.

She continued her piano studies in Vienna with Paul Weingarten and in London by Mathilde Verne, who had been a pupil of Clara Schumann. Lympany claimed that she had learned some elements of Clara Schumann’s style – “to play straight, nothing chichi, no what I call powdered rubato. And never to bang the keys like so many players do today.”

After Harrogate, her career slowly developed while she learned a repertoire (eventually more than 60 concertos). She would often leave the platform in tears because of worry over the wrong notes she had played. Her teacher Tobias Matthay consoled her: “But think of how many right notes you played.” All her life, she practiced for four hours a day. “None of this eight hours a day stuff,” she said. “If you can’t get it right in four, you never will.”

She played Bach and Schumann at her Lonon debut in 1935, and in 1938, she came in second to the Russian Emil Gilels at the Ysaye piano competition in Brussels. Her playing impressed King Leopold, who invited her to lunch and asked her to make some special recordings for him.

During World War II, she became a national figure, performing concertos with orchestras throughout Britain, often traveling in hazardous and arduous conditions, an indispensable part of wartime musical life when piano concertos were all the rage. In 1940 she gave the British premiere of Khachaturyan’s concerto, with which she became identified.

She was the first British musician to perform in Paris after the liberation, when she played Alan Rawsthorne’s first concerto while German gunfire could still be heard outside the city.

Her American debut came in 1948, and the New York Times’s critic practically burst with enthusiasm, noting her “keen insight and superb pianistic insight.”

In 1970, she underwent a mastectomy. Her career around this time went through a bad patch, as she admitted. “I was playing more wrong notes than I should have done.” She consoled herself that she had enjoyed recitals by Alfred Cortot, notorious for inaccuracy. But when she spoke in this vein to the conductor Herbert von Karajan, he said: “No, today you must play the right notes. In the age of recording, people expect it. You can’t get away with it any more.” “He was right,” she said. Thenceforward she enjoyed an Indian summer.

In her seventies she made regular tours of America where she was much acclaimed. She re-recorded all the Chopin Preludes and in her 80th-birthday year of 1996 performed in Japan for the first time.

An ineradicable feature of Lympany performances was her evident enjoyment in playing the piano. She said that, after more than six decades as a performer, she asked herself before each concert: “Why are you doing this? It’s the last time. Then of course the minute it’s over and the reviews are good, I feel exhilarated and have the courage to go on to the next one.”

In 1944, she secretly married Lieutenant Colonel Colin Defries, managing director of an engineering firm, who was an excellent amateur pianist and a keen gardener. They were divorced in 1950. The next year, she married Bennet Korn, an American television executive, and moved to America. After two miscarriages, one of twins, she gave premature birth to a son who lived for only 35 hours. Her second marriage ended in 1961. She died at Menton, in France.