Maria João Pires “shapes and colours every phrase, and with immaculate taste, and she makes sure the phrases end as eloquently as they begin,” wrote Gramophone in 1974. “She conveys not just the details but the relevance of every note to the whole ... Best of all, she communicates everything she has discovered about the music, and it is worth having.” This Portuguese pupil of Wilhelm Kempff, Pires was one of the artists who defined the Erato label in the 1970s and 1980s.
With her refined, honest artistry, the Portugese pianist Maria João Pires – who turns 70 in July 2014 – was one of the musicians who defined the Erato label in the 1970s and 1980s. This 17-CD box gathers together all the recordings she made over the period from 1972 to 1987 and it reflects the consistent focus of her repertoire, with its special emphasis on Austro-German composers of the Classical and early-Romantic periods. Embracing solo works, piano duets and concertos, it contains works by Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, but also by Bach and Chopin.
In 1974, Gramophone welcomed her (in Mozart) as a pianist who “shapes and colours every phrase, and with immaculate taste, and she makes sure the phrases end as eloquently as they begin ... she gets beneath the music’s surface and conveys not just the details but the relevance of every note to the whole ... Best of all, in the moment of performance she communicates everything she has discovered about the music, and it is worth having.”
After initial studies at the Lisbon Conservatory, Maria João Pires moved to Germany where her teachers included the great Wilhelm Kempff and the man who became her mentor: the Swiss-born pianist Karl Engel, a pupil of Alfred Cortot and well known as an accompanist to singers. In 1970, she won the Beethoven Bicentennial Competition in Brussels, which brought her to international attention. Over the years she has become recognised as a pianist in the line of such great figures as Kempff, Edwin Fischer and Clara Haskil – musicians valued by connoisseurs for favouring clarity and putting the composer and his music first, rather than drawing attention to themselves.
The Penguin Guide wrote that “She strikes an ideal balance between poise and expressive sensibility, conveying a sense of spontaneity in everything she does, while in a 2012 interview Pires summed up her philosophy as a musician: “Learning music is learning about life. You don’t learn how to play an instrument without learning how to discover music through yourself. Your relationship to the outside world is very important.” Speaking to Gramophone in 1996, she said: a concert should allow one to experience some kind of emotion ... to dream ... Life is so short – we should try to live things more intensely.”
Seeing her performing career as just one part of her life, Pires has never been hungry for publicity and fame; her family is very important to her and for several years she ran a music education centre on her farm in Portugal.
Pires’ partners on these classic Erato recordings include the Turkish pianist Hüseyin Sermet (in duets by Schubert) and the conductors Michel Corboz, Armin Jordan, Claudio Scimone and Theodor Guschlbauer. A number of items in the collection (which features the original LP/CD artwork on the individual CD slipcases) have never before been released on CD on Europe: Beethoven, Sonatas op 109 and 110; Chopin, Préludes and Krakowiak; Mozart Concertos Nos. 8 & 27 (with Claudio Scimone conducting I Solisti Veneti).
