Biography (read more)
Martha Argerich was born on 5 June 1941 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and began playing piano at age three, studying from age five with Vincenzo Scaramuzza. She gave her first concerto performance at eight and moved with her family to Europe in 1955, studying with Friedrich Gulda in Vienna and later with Stefan Askenase, Maria Curcio, and briefly Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. At sixteen she won both the Geneva International Music Competition and the Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition within weeks of each other (1957), and in 1965 she won the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, launching her international career. Since the 1980s she has largely stepped back from solo recitals, dedicating herself instead to concertos and chamber music with partners including Gidon Kremer, Mischa Maisky, and Nelson Freire, while also mentoring younger pianists through her Martha Argerich Project in Lugano and the Argerich festival in Beppu, Japan.
Widely regarded as one of the greatest pianists alive, Argerich combined ferocious technical command with an instinctive, combustible musicality that redefined how Chopin, Liszt, Prokofiev, and Schumann could sound in performance. Her early studio recordings, such as the 1965 Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6 and Prokofiev’s Toccata, remain benchmark interpretations, and her championing of younger artists (including a decisive early endorsement of Ivo Pogorelić and glowing praise for Daniil Trifonov) has shaped the careers of subsequent generations of pianists. Three Grammy Awards, a Kennedy Center Honor (2016), and the Praemium Imperiale (2005) reflect a six-decade career that helped keep large-scale Romantic and 20th-century virtuoso repertoire vital for mainstream audiences.
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