Biography (read more)
Clifford Michael Curzon was born in Islington, London, in 1907. The family name was Siegenberg; it was changed to Curzon in 1914, during the First World War. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Charles Reddie and later Katharine Goodson, and afterwards abroad — with Artur Schnabel in Berlin, and with Wanda Landowska and Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He credited Schnabel with what he learned about phrasing and Landowska with precision of technique. In 1931 he married the American harpsichordist Lucille Wallace, who died in 1977.
He signed with Decca in 1937 and remained with the label for the rest of his career, and made his American debut in 1939. In 1952 he formed the Edinburgh Festival Piano Quartet with Joseph Szigeti, William Primrose and Pierre Fournier.
Curzon suffered from stage fright, and unusually for a soloist of his generation he performed with the score rather than from memory. He was appointed CBE in 1958, awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s gold medal in 1980, and knighted in 1977. He died in London on 1 September 1982, aged 75, and is buried in St Patrick’s churchyard at Patterdale.
Curzon began as a player of Romantic and virtuoso repertoire, championing lesser-known concertos and new compositions, but he is remembered for the classical centre of the repertoire he turned to later: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms. His Mozart concertos with Benjamin Britten and his 1947 Wanderer Fantasy are among the recordings that established that reputation, and his 1944 Tchaikovsky First Concerto survives from the earlier phase.
He was famously self-critical about recording, and vetoed the release of performances he judged unsatisfactory — he returned to Mozart’s B flat concerto K595 repeatedly between 1964 and 1970 without being satisfied. The result is a discography smaller than a career of that length would suggest, and a reputation partly built on what he refused to publish.
His chamber playing, and in particular the Edinburgh Festival Piano Quartet formed with Szigeti, Primrose and Fournier, placed him among the leading collaborative musicians of his generation.
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