Maria João Pires

Maria João Pires was born in Lisbon in 1944. She made her first public performance at the age of four and at seven performed Mozart’s Piano Concertos in Oporto, Portugal. At the age of nine, she received Portugal’s highest award for young musicians just one year later. From 1953 until 1960 she studied at the Lisbon Conservatory with Professor Campos Coelho and took courses in composition, theory, and history of music with Francine Benoit. She continued her studies in Germany, first at the Munich Music Academy with Rosl Schmid, then in Hanover with Karl Engel. In 1970, she won first prize at the Brussels Beethoven International Competition commemorating the composer’s 200th birthday and gained international recognition. She has since devoted herself to reflecting the influence of art in life, community, and education, trying to discover new ways of establishing this way of thinking in society. She has searched for new ways which, respecting the development of individuals and cultures, encourage the sharing of ideas. Pires has appeared all over the globe with all the major orchestras, making her London debut in 1986 and appearing in Hamburg, Paris, and Amsterdam during the inaugural tour of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra with Claudio Abbado. Other performances include engagements with the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, the Orchestre de Paris, and the Wiener Philharmoniker. She is also a keen performer of chamber music. In recent years, she has been heard at all the major international festivals including the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the Schubertiade, Tanglewood, Ravinia, Montpellier, Lucerne, Edinburgh and BBC Proms. In addition to her concerts, she has made recordings for Deutsche Grammophon since 1989, the same year in which she received the Pessoa Prize for her services to the arts. In 1999, she created the Belgais Centre for the Study of the Arts in Portugal. Pires regularly offers interdisciplinary workshops for professional musicians and music lovers and in the Belgais concert hall, concerts and recordings regularly take place. In 2012, in Belgium, she initiated two complementary projects; the Partitura Choirs, a project which creates and develops choirs for children from disadvantaged backgrounds as in Belgium the „Hesperos Choir, and the Partitura Workshops. All the Partitura projects have the aim to create an altruistic dynamic between artists of different generations by proposing an alternative in a world too often focused on competitiveness.