Renowned Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires was distinguished with the prestigious Japan’s ‘2024 Praemium Imperiale Award for Music’ for her exceptional contributions to classical music.
Renowned globally, the piano virtuoso has long been admired for her heartfelt interpretations of composers like Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven.
This prestigious award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize for the Arts,” highlights her career, which has included a vast catalog of recordings and concerts over several decades. She has released recordings for the Erato label for 15 years and with Deutsche Grammophon for 25 years.
Established in 1988, and awarded by the Japan Art Association, the prestigious 2024 Praemium Imperiale Awards include other laureates namely, Shigeru Ban in Architecture, Doris Salcedo in Sculpture, Sophie Calle in Painting, and Ang Lee in Theatre/Film.
The prize recognizes lifetime achievement in fields not covered by the Nobel Prizes, including painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and theatre/film. The cash award amounts to 15 million Yen (approximately USD 102,000).
Maria João Pires’s most prestigious awards include first prize at the 1970 International Beethoven Competition, UNESCO’s International Music Council prize, and the 1989 Pessoa Prize. She is also the recipient of the Don Juan de Borbón da Música Prize for her artistic and human qualities and the Prémio Eduardo Lourenço for her contribution to the diffusion of musical culture.
Her international breakthrough came in 1970 when she won the Beethoven Bicentennial Competition in Brussels, which catapulted her to global fame. Following this, she performed in some of the most prestigious concert halls worldwide and became known for her expressive and nuanced performances, especially of Mozart’s piano sonatas and concertos. Her recordings of Mozart are considered some of the finest interpretations of his work.
Previous winners of Japan’s Praemium Imperiale Award include Wynton Marsalis, Yo-Yo Ma, Leonard Bernstein, Judi Dench, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Phillip Glass, David Hockney, Steve Reich, Robert Rauschenberg, Ravi Shankar, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Billie Tsein, and Tod Williams.
Maria João Pires – Born in 1944 in Lisbon, Maria João Pires gave her first public performance at the age of four and began her studies of music and piano with Campos Coelho and Francine Benoît, continuing later in Germany with Rosl Schmid and Karl Engel. In 1970, she won first prize at the Beethoven Bicentennial Competition in Brussels.
Following her highly acclaimed London debut at Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1986, Pires appeared in Hamburg, Paris, and Amsterdam during the inaugural tour of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra with Claudio Abbado in 1987. She has since toured or performed with many of the world’s greatest orchestras, including the Berliner Philharmoniker, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, London Philharmonic, Wiener Philharmoniker and Orchestre de Paris, among others.
Pires has won the Grand Prix du Disque four times: in 1995 for her first Chopin recording, the following year for Bach’s ensemble of Partitas and Suites, and for Chopin’s Complete Nocturnes and Brahms’s Piano Trios with Augustin Dumay and Jian Wang in 1997. Her extensive discography includes recordings for Deutsche Grammophon and Erato.
In 1999, Pires created the Belgais Centre for the Study of the Arts in Portugal. She regularly offers interdisciplinary workshops for professional musicians and music lovers. In the Belgais concert hall, concerts and recordings regularly take place. In the future, these will be shared with the international digital community.
In 2012, in Belgium, she initiated two complementary projects: the Partitura Choirs, a project that creates and develops choirs for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and the Partitura workshops. The purpose of the Partitura projects is to create an altruistic dynamic between artists of different generations by proposing an alternative in a world too often focused on competitiveness. This philosophy is being spread at Partitura projects and workshops worldwide.
In 2023 she was awarded the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance by the Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University. Established in 2005, the biennial prestigious award honors pianists who have achieved the highest levels of national and international recognition.
PAJ/Staff
