Progetto Martha Argerich

italiano

Performers

piano

Maria João Pires

 

The Portuguese pianist, Maria-João Pires, started playing at the age of three, giving her first public performance two years later. Pires performed Mozart concertos when she was seven and received Portugal’s major prize for musicians at nine. She studied with Campos Coelho and Francine Benoit at the Lisbon Conservatory, graduating at 16. Postgraduate studies took her to Germany, where she studied with Rösl Schmidt, in Munich, and with Karl Engel, in Hannover. In 1970, she won the Beethoven Bicentennial Competition in Brussels. Maria-João Pires made her London debut in 1986, and she first played in New York three years later. She has performed with the major European and American orchestras, including the Berliner Philharmoniker, Boston Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, and Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam. Often praised for her extraordinary renditions of Mozart’s works, Pires has shown a remarkable affinity with several of the greatest composers, including Bach, Schubert and Chopin. An enormously successful recording artist, Pires released several critically acclaimed discs. Her recording of Mozart’s complete sonatas received the 1990 Grand Prix du Disque. Since 1989, Pires has been an enthusiastic performer of chamber music, touring Europe and the Far East with violinist Augustin Dumay. Forming a trio with Dumay and cellist Jian Wang, Pires toured the Far East in 1998, playing Beethoven’s Concerto for piano, violin, cello, and orchestra in several European centres in 1999. In 2000, Pires decided to take several months off in order to concentrate on a variety of educational projects in Portugal. Several collections of her performances, including Artist Portrait: Maria-João Pires, appeared in the early 2000’s.

Performances

Works Performed

  • Mozart - Concerto in D min. K 466
  • Mozart - Sonata in re magg. K 381