Perahia, Murray

MURRAY PERAHIA

Born: New York, New York, 19 April 1947

Genre: Classical

Murray Perahia is one of the most accomplished pianists of his generation. During the 1990s, as piano recital series across the United States found it increasingly difficult to survive, Perahia was one of the few pianists who consistently managed to fill concert halls. His evolution as an artist has been steady, deliberate, and on his own terms.

Born in New York, Perahia began studying the piano at the age of three. At five he was studying with Jeanette Haien, who coached him through graduation from the High School of Performing Arts. He attended Mannes College of Music, graduating with degrees in conducting and composition, and studied piano privately with Mieczyslaw Horszowski and Artur Balsam.

Perahia was invited by the pianist Rudolf Serkin to the Marlboro Festival in Vermont, where he had the opportunity to work and perform with some of the biggest names in the classical music world—among them cellist Pablo Casals, Serkin, Alexander Schneider, and the Budapest String Quartet. For a year he was Serkin's teaching assistant at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.

In 1968 Perahia made his Carnegie Hall debut and in 1972 he won the prestigious Leeds International Piano Competition, which launched his international career. The prize came with numerous concert dates in prestigious venues, but Perahia turned down about half of them, saying that he really was not ready.

In 1973 he played his first concert at the Aldeburgh Festival, meeting and working with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, and accompanying Pears in lieder recitals. In 1975 he won the $50,000 Avery Fisher Prize. In the 1970s he also struck up a friendship with pianist Vladimir Horowitz, who had a profound impact on him.

In 1976 Perahia moved to London, and from 1981 to 1989, he served as co-artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival, working with Oliver Knussen and Stuart Bedford. In 1990 his career suffered a setback when he got a paper cut on his right thumb. It became infected so he took antibiotics, which made him sick. When he stopped the drugs, his thumb swelled up, and doctors made him quit playing the piano for four years. He used the time to study and analyze music, and, when he returned to performing, his musicianship had deepened.

At the beginning of his career Perahia was known for his mastery of piano color and his ability to create a multidimensional palette of sound. Unlike many pianists, he felt little need to perform everything, preferring to stick to the repertoire he felt he understood best. Mozart, Chopin, and Schubert were favorites. After his hiatus, however, he began to delve into heavier repertoire, and critics noted the extra heft. He also began exploring Bach seriously, recording all the keyboard concertos, the Goldberg Variations and the English Suites. His recording of the Suites earned him a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Performance in 1998. His recording of the Chopin Ballades won him a Gramophone Award in 1995.

Perahia has recorded the complete Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin concertos. His chamber-music recordings include a 1989 Grammy-winning disc of Bartok's Sonata for Percussion and Two Pianos with Sir Georg Solti. In 2000 he was named principal guest conductor of the Academy of St. Martin's in the Fields and performs with the group as conductor and soloist.

Perahia is not a virtuoso in the traditional sense, though he has plenty of technical fire. He is not an intellectual pianist in the mode of a Serkin or Alfred Brendel. And he is not a grand romantic in the tradition of Arthur Rubenstein. What he brings to the keyboard is a sense of poetry and a distinctive sound harnessed to a deep understanding of the music he chooses to perform. Impeccably tasteful and uncompromising, Perahia is nevertheless one of the world's most popular classical pianists.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Bach: Goldberg Variations (Sony, 2000); Bach: English Suites, Nos. 1, 3, 5 (Sony, 1998); Chopin: 4 Ballades (Sony, 1995); The Aldeburgh Recital (Sony, 1991).

douglas mclennan