Telmo Pires

If you don't already know Portuguese pianist Maria-João Pires, there's every reason to get this two-disc set. There's the exquisite beauty of her Mozart F major Sonata from 1990, the restless intimacy of her Schubert Drei Klavierstücke from 1997, the unbearable intensity of her Chopin Nocturnes from 1995, the reckless fervor of her Schumann Concerto with Claudio Abbado leading the Chamber Orchestra of Europe from 1997, and the transcendent rapture of her Mozart A major Concerto with Frans Brüggen leading the Mozarteum-Orchester Salzburg from 1995.

Passion rather than insouciance is Pires’s keynote. Here is no soft, moonlit option but an intensity and drama that scorn all complacent salon or drawing-room expectations. How she relishes Chopin’s central storms, creating a vivid and spectacular yet unhistrionic contrast with all surrounding serenity or ‘embalmed darkness’. The con fuoco of Op. 15 No. 1 erupts in a fine fury and in the first Nocturne, Op. 9 No. 1, Pires’s sharp observance of Chopin’s appassionato marking comes like a prophecy of the coda’s sudden blaze. Such resolution and psychological awareness make you realize that Chopin, like D. H. Lawrence, may well have thought that “there must be a bit of fear, and a bit of horror in your life”. Chopin, Pires informs us in no uncertain terms, was no sentimentalist.

The sublime results were worth the wait: after forty years of collaboration, Maria João Pires and Maestro Claudio Abbado record two of Mozart’s most beloved piano concertos for the very first time. Maria João Pires weaves dark, dramatic strains into the miraculous luminosity of the D minor Concerto No.20, K.466 with a simplicity that makes her Mozart supreme. She then bestows a glowing majesty upon Mozart’s last piano concerto, the serene Concerto No.27 K. 595 in B flat major, as only an artist of her gifts and profound experience can.

Iconic Deutsche Grammophon pianist and celebrated Schubert interpreter Maria João Pires returns to further explore the music of the quintessential romantic composer; deepening a musical relationship that has captivated critics and public alike throughout her career. The Portugese pianist has not recorded either of these sonatas for DG before and this recording of the brooding and expansive Sonata no.16 in A minor is her first for any label.

Deutsche Grammophon has another excellent Schumann Concerto in its catalog, the Pollini/Abbado, with the Berlin Philharmonic, coupled with a good but not great Schoenberg Piano Concerto. Not surprisingly, Pollini is more muscular and evenly balanced in the Schumann, even if he is, as usual, a bit straitlaced. Pires is always the sensitive and probing artist, or so it seems. Here, she is alert from the opening descending chords to the expressive potential in every bar. She puts much more thinking and feeling in her interpretation than Pollini and most others I've heard.

It's a recording that just a few years ago would have been mainstream: a "name" pianist (albeit one much less well known in the U.S. than elsehwere), who has been playing Mozart's piano concertos since childhood, joins forces with a name conductor with whom she has frequently collaborated, leading a modern-instrument orchestra of some 70 players, with the results released on a major international-conglomerate label. Now it's distinctly unusual. But lo, there's value in the old ways. Portuguese-Brazilian pianist Maria-João Pires is a lifelong Mozart specialist, but she still has new things to say in two of Mozart's most popular piano concertos. You can chalk it up to her Buddhist outlook if you like: her readings of the Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat major, K. 595, and Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466, might be described as detached without being lifeless. Her approach is most startling in the Piano Concerto No. 20, where her no-drama shaping of the material runs sharply counter to type. Sample the piano's entrance in the first movement, where it offers a twisting, tense elaboration of the main theme that is far removed from its source material. Generally pianists use this to raise the tension level, but Pires lets the unusually shaped, chromatic line speak for itself with fine effect.

Maria Joâo Pires · Le Voyage Magnifique · Schubert Impromptus
FLAC 326 MB | MP3 HQ 164 MB | Booklet | Covers | EAC Log | 1997

Maria Joâo Pires takes us on a truly magnificent journey in the company of Schubert Photo DGIStemer ip Le Voyage Magnifique Schubert Impromptus. Gramophone

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.