Maria João Pires

Acclaimed among the biggest interpreters of Mozart, Portuguese pianist Maria-João Pires can be an artist who combines beautiful stylistic refinement with a significant effort to plumb the intellectual complexities and spiritual depths of music. Refusing to comply with the traditional picture of a concert virtuoso, Pires stresses the spiritual measurements of music, often searching for concealed meanings which might elude the analytical performer. This exceptional reverence toward functions of music, obviously manifested in her shows of Mozart, was produced explicit by her remark that, being a performer, she works as a route for the composer’s concepts. Interestingly, Pires sights both composer as well as the performer as conduits to get a transcendent force. Nevertheless, while approaching the task of music with tremendous awe, Pires can be acutely alert to its formal framework, finding a specific transparency in probably the most elaborate formal constructions. In her shows of Romantic experts, especially Chopin and Schumann, Pires masterfully reconciles her passionate connection with the music with an excellent understanding for the internal logic of the task she actually is interpreting. Reflecting her huge psychological range, her shade, as critics possess observed, has a dizzying selection of intensities, from an nearly imperceptible lightness for an imposing monumentality, with a wealthy size of intervening nuances. Another hallmark of her design can be her uncanny capability to catch, and convey, the complete variety of internal motion that constitutes the becoming of a specific musical creation. Pires began playing at age three, providing her first general public performance 2 yrs later on. Pires performed Mozart concertos when she was seven and received Portugal’s main prize for music artists at nine. She analyzed with Campos Coelho and Francine Benoit in the Lisbon Conservatory, graduating at 16. Post-graduate research required her to Germany, where she analyzed with Rösl Schmidt, in Munich, along with Karl Engel, in Hanover. In 1970, she earned the Beethoven Bicentennial Competition in Brussels. Pires produced her London debut in 1986, and she initial played in NY three years afterwards. She’s performed using the main Western european and American orchestras, like the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, as well as the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Frequently praised on her behalf incredible renditions of Mozart’s functions, Pires shows an extraordinary affinity with many of the best composers, including Bach, Chopin, and Schubert. An enormously effective documenting musician, Pires, who since 1989 information solely for Deutsche Grammophon, released many critically acclaimed discs, including a Bach disk, recordings of Chopin’s Nocturnes and Schubert’s Impromptus, along with a documenting of two Mozart concertos with Claudio Abbado. Her documenting of Mozart’s total sonatas received the 1990 Grand Prix du Disque. Since 1989, Pires continues to be a keen performer of chamber music, touring European countries and china and taiwan with violinist Augustin Dumay. Developing a trio with Dumay and cellist Jian Wang, Pires toured china and taiwan in 1998, playing Beethoven’s Concerto for piano, violin, cello, and orchestra in a number of Western centers in 1999. In 2000, Pires made a decision to take almost a year off to be able to concentrate on a number of educational tasks in Portugal. Many selections of her shows, including Artist Family portrait: Maria-João Pires, made an appearance in the first 2000s. By 2005, she was documenting again, liberating a disk of Schubert duets with Ricardo Castro, and in 2008 a fresh two-disc group of Chopin’s music.