Leonora Milà Romeu

Winner of the 1966 Maria Canals International Music Competition (Barcelona) and finalist of the Concorso Internazionale Viotti (Vercelli, Italy), Leonora Milà has managed to combine, throughout her professional career, her abilities as both a performer and composer. Lengthy tours across Europe, the United States and Asia led her to become the first Spanish artist to perform in the People's Republic of China (1979), to record an album with the China National Symphony Orchestra (1988) and to become the first female composer to premiere a ballet in St. Petersburg. The ballet in question was Tirant lo Blanc, a chivalric novel written by Joanot Martorell in the 15th century, subsequently scored by Leonora Milà and transformed into a two-hour ballet by Russian dancer and choreographer Yuri Petukhov. For her efforts, Milà was awarded the International Catalan Culture Prize in Valencia (1995). Later on, in 1996, Tirant lo Blanc was premiered in the Gran Teatre del Liceu by the St. Petersburg State Ballet company. Motion picture director Antoni Ribas was in charge of filming the ballet, later aired on Televisión Española and released to the public on DVD.

She started her international career at the age of 12, when she performed piano works by Enric Granados and Manuel de Falla on a BBC London television programme. She returned a year later, in 1955, to interpret composer Manuel de Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain in the Royal Albert Hall, performing alongside a London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Rudolph Dunbar.

Leonora Milà Romeu (Vilanova i la Geltrú, 1942) is a Catalan pianist and composer.

The pianist and composer Leonora Milà was born in Vilanova i la Geltrú (Barcelona) in 1942, into a family with close ties to the world of music. Her father, Josep Milà, was a cellist in the Orquestra Pau Casals and the Orquestra del Gran Teatre del Liceu de Barcelona. A disciple of pedagogue Maria Canals, Leonora Milà was dubbed a "child prodigy" in the wake of two concerts she performed in the Palau de la Música Catalana in 1949. Whilst just six years old, she interpreted a piece that she herself had composed, along with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's concerto KV488 for piano and orchestra, accompanied by the Orquestra Ciutat de Barcelona.