Australian pianist Eileen Joyce was one of the biggest musical celebrities in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s, thanks in part to her work in films including Brief Encounter and The Seventh Veil. At the same time, her popularity generated anxiety among critics, who associated her with a stultification of orchestral culture. Joyce casts light on a more commercial side of middlebrow endeavors, and onto a postwar British effort to build a mass audience for art music by bringing the concert hall closer to the world of film and popular entertainment. She also shows how a concert culture directly aimed at social mobility and mass appeal was discounted by critics, who saw in its appeal to pleasure—as well as work—a threat to the health of music itself.