Alicia de Larrocha y de la Calle was born in Barcelona on 23 May 1923 into a family of pianists: both her parents played, and she was the niece of pianists. She began study at the age of three with Frank Marshall, and made her first public appearance as a small child at the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition. She recorded Chopin at nine, her feet not yet able to reach the pedals, and made her orchestral debut at eleven. She also composed from the age of seven until around her thirtieth year, though she never played her own music in public.

International touring began in 1947, and in 1954 she toured North America with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She went on to serve as director of the Marshall Academy, the school of her own teacher, holding that post alongside a performing career. She was less than five feet tall and her hands barely spanned a tenth on the keyboard, a limitation offset by a long fifth finger and an unusually wide stretch between thumb and index finger.

She married the pianist Juan Torra, with whom she had two children; he died in 1982. Among many honours she received the Franz Liszt Award in Budapest in 1980, was made a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1988, took the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 1994, and in 1995 became the first Spanish artist to receive the UNESCO Prize. She retired from public performance in October 2003 after a career of seventy-six years, and died in Barcelona on 25 September 2009 at the age of eighty-six.

De Larrocha is the pianist most closely identified with the Spanish repertoire, and for much of the twentieth century she effectively set the terms on which it was played. Recordings of Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados, Manuel de Falla and Federico Mompou form the core of her discography, and she is credited with bringing the music of Albéniz and Granados to a considerably wider audience than it had previously reached.

That association was recognised twice by the Recording Academy, both times in the category for an instrumental soloist without orchestra: in 1989 for the album of Iberia, Navarra and the Suite Española, and in 1992 for a Granados disc built around Goyescas. Her range extended well beyond Spain — she was also nominated for recordings of Mozart, Schubert, Ravel and Falla, and set down Antonio Soler’s keyboard sonatas in 1967 — but it is the Spanish literature on which her reputation rests. Later Spanish pianists sought her out directly: Javier Perianes was among those who worked with her in masterclasses.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alicia_de_Larrocha
https://www.grammy.com/artists/alicia-de-larrocha/2695