James Gibb

James Gibb, who has died aged 95, flourished as a concert pianist in the years immediately after the Second World War, during which he served as a radio operator with the Royal Artillery, lustily singing themes by Beethoven as his landing craft approached the French coast on D-day. On arrival, he sang The Marseillaise.

Later, in desecrated post-war Germany, he played the piano for ENSA (Entertainments National Services Association) and seized his chance to appear as soloist under Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt's conductorship in Hamburg. This opportunity, and another with the same conductor in Ireland, helped to provide a basis for his successful British concert career.

Born in Monkseaton, North Tyneside. James Gibb was educated in Edinburgh and was taught piano by the splendidly-named George Ramsay Geikie, a deeply conservative Scottish Brahmsian who – when I myself later became a fractious pupil – had shaken with mirth on hearing me play Bartok at my audition. But by that time Geikie had already schooled Gibb to admiration.

Dohnanyi's Variations on a Nursery Song was one of his party pieces, which he played not only in Scotland but twice at the London Proms, as well as the same composer's Second Piano Concerto and the Liszt arrangement of Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy. A polished, conspicuously confident performer, he brought impressive zest to everything he touched, no matter whether it was Bach, Beethoven or Balakirev, of whose Second Piano Concerto he gave the British premiere.

He shared a musical and political background with his close friend the composer Alan Rawsthorne – both of them were, for a time, ardent communists. He also had links with Constant Lambert, author and composer. But constant concert touring, which brought him frequently to Edinburgh and Glasgow, gradually began to pall, even when it included such novelties as the second piano part in the British premiere of Marc Blitzstein's opera The Cradle Will Rock, which he played in 1951.

Before long he had his eye on the Guildhall School of Music in London, where he began a teaching career in the early 1960s and whose piano department he ran with huge flair from 1967. What time he had left over continued to be taken up by politics (he wore a beret as a political statement). As early as 1938 he had marched against Oswald Mosley's Fascists, and by 2003, at the age of 85, he was out marching again in Hyde Park in the anti-war protest that year. By then his top flat in London, which for long had been a mecca for friends, pupils, and fellow-musicians, was proving too high to climb to, so he moved to the ground floor and went on teaching and entertaining.

Throughout his career, he clearly loved life, even if he latterly preferred the privacy of broadcasting – his BBC talk on Beethoven's A major Sonata, Op 101, went down in history – to the showmanship of public performance. But as a panellist in the 1990 Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow, he drew world attention to himself when he publicly announced that one of the candidates had offered him a £1000 bribe, which he promptly returned.