Guiomar Novaes was born in São João da Boa Vista, Brazil, on 28 February 1895, one of the youngest of a very large family. At fourteen she won the foreign place at the Paris Conservatoire against 387 applicants, before a jury including Debussy and Fauré — Debussy wrote admiringly of her — and studied with Isidor Philipp. She played for six decades, and died in São Paulo on 7 March 1979.

Novaes was the great singing pianist of the Americas: a tone and phrasing of such individuality that critics called her playing instinctive, though it was anything but. Her Chopin and Schumann recordings for Vox remain touchstones of the lyric approach, and in this catalogue they stand as the pole of pure cantabile against every structural reading.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guiomar_Novaes
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q435341