Life and career

Jones was born in Sydney[1] on 6 June 1927. She grew up in the Sydney suburbs of Warrawee, Turramurra, and Gladesville.[2][3] She began playing piano at age six and won the under-10 piano section at the City of Sydney Eisteddfod in both 1935 and 1936, along with the under-12 sightreading section in the latter year. She was taught by Millicent Farraher.[4][5][6] At age 10, she was invited to study with pianist Alexander Hmelnitsky at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music by its director Edgar Bainton and made her first radio broadcast with the Australian Broadcasting Commission playing a pastoral sonata by Domenico Scarlatti and Mozart’s Fantasia in D minor, at age 12, she was described in the Sydney newspaper The Sun as “well-known to Sydney concert-goers”, and at age 13, she performed the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in a concert for children with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.[1][2][5][7][8] She performed with Musica Viva Australia from 1948 to 1950, invited by Richard Goldner, and helped shaping the new ensemble,[9] with Goldner, Robert Pikler and Edward Cockman.[10]

Jones briefly lived in London and then went to Zurich, where she formed a duo with Australian violinist Brenton Langbein[1][9] which became a trio with him and Australian horn player Barry Tuckwell.[1] She began collaborating on four-hand piano repertoire with Dario De Rosa,[9] the pianist of the Trio di Trieste [it], whom she married; she moved to Trieste with him and the couple had a daughter. She later married the cellist of the trio, Amadeo Baldovino.[1][2]

She performed with the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Tonhalle Orchester Zürich, and the Berlin Philharmonic, for the Edinburgh International Festival, the BBC and the RAI; and for the Academy of St. Cecilia[1] and at La Fenice in Venice.[2] In 1979 she co-founded Quintetto Fauré with violinist Pina Carmirelli.[1][2]

Jones lived in Rome for ten years until moving to Florence to teach at the Fiesole School of Music, living with Baldovino until his death in 1998. After 18 years in Florence, she moved to Lugano, Switzerland.[1][2] In 2017, she performed a concert in Trieste for her 90th birthday with pianist Massimiliano Baggio; they played Brahms’s two-piano arrangement of his Piano Quartet No. 2 in A, Op. 26.[2] She was made a Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.[3]

Jones died in Lugano in September 2026, at the age of 99.[1][9]