Maria João Pires

Pires was born in Lisbon, Portugal, a posthumous daughter of João Baptista Pires and his wife Alzira dos Santos Alexandre Barbosa. She has three siblings: Hugo Alexandre Barbosa Pires, Maria Regina Alexandre Barbosa Pires and Maria Helena Alexandre Barbosa Pires.

Her first recital was at the age of five, and at the age of seven she was already playing Mozart piano concertos publicly. Two years later she received Portugal's top prize for young musicians. In the following years, she studied with Campos Coelho at the Lisbon Conservatory, taking courses in composition, theory, and history of music. She continued her studies in Germany, first in the Musikakademie of Munich with Rosl Schmid and then in Hanover with Karl Engel.

International fame came in 1970, when she won the Beethoven Bicentennial Competition in Brussels. Subsequently, she performed with major orchestras in Europe, America, Canada, Israel and Japan, interpreting works by Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, Mozart, Brahms, Chopin and other classical and romantic composers.

Her professionalism achieved worldwide recognition when 1998 documentary Attrazione d'amore was drawn to the attention of the press and went viral in 2013, and again in 2024. At the start of a lunchtime open rehearsal with Italian conductor Riccardo Chailly in Amsterdam, Pires realized that she had prepared for a different Mozart concerto, "Piano Concerto No. 23", instead of "Piano Concerto No. 20" which the orchestra had started playing. Quickly recovering, she played the correct concerto from memory without error.

Pires performed at the BBC Proms in 2010. In an interview beforehand, she said that after 60 years of recitals and concerts she had cut back her performances but was non-committal about retirement.

From 2012 to 2016, she was a Master in Residence at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Waterloo, Belgium, where she gave piano lessons and master classes to young talented pianists from all over the world. To foster young musicians, she launched the Partitura Project.

In 2017, she announced her retirement from the stage and tours for 2018, but she continued giving concerts.

On February 20, 2019, she was awarded with a Doctorate Honorary Degree by Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona. In 2023, she was given the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance from the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University.

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