Alfred Cortot

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. This 5-CD box gathers together the recordings she made over the period from 1976 to 1985 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, Schumann, Beethoven, but also by Bach and Chopin.

La Bruchollerie was born in Paris. She came from a family of musicians, both François-Adrien Boieldieu and André Messager being among her ancestors. At the age of 7 she entered the class of Isidor Philipp (a friend of her parents) at the Paris Conservatoire, which she left in 1928 with a first prize. After that she was a pupil of Alfred Cortot in Paris, of Emil von Sauer in Vienna and of Raoul von Koczalski in Berlin. A concert she gave in 1932 under the baton of Charles Münch brought her breakthrough as a pianist. Between 1936 und 1938 she went on to take part in more piano competitions, above all in the Chopin Competition of 1938 in Warsaw and the 1939 Brussels Competition.