Murray Perahia
Biography
In the more than 40 years he has been performing on the concert stage, American pianist Murray Perahia has become one of the most sought-after and cherished pianists of our time, performing in all of the major international music centers and with every leading orchestra. He is the Principal Guest Conductor of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, with whom he has toured as conductor and pianist throughout the United States, Europe, Japan, and South East Asia.
Born in New York, Mr. Perahia started playing piano at the age of four, and later attended Mannes College where he majored in conducting and composition. His summers were spent at the Marlboro Festival, where he collaborated with such musicians as Rudolf Serkin, Pablo Casals, and the members of the Budapest String Quartet. He also studied at the time with Mieczyslaw Horszowski. In subsequent years, he developed a close friendship with Vladimir Horowitz, whose perspective and personality were an abiding inspiration. In 1972 Mr. Perahia won the Leeds International Piano Competition, and in 1973 he gave his first concert at the Aldeburgh Festival, where he worked closely with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, accompanying the latter in many lieder recitals. Mr. Perahia was co-artistic director of the Festival from 1981 to 1989.
Mr. Perahia has a wide and varied discography. Sony Classical has issued a special boxed set edition of all his recordings including several DVDs entitled The First 40 Years. His recording of Brahms Händel Variations, which won the Grammophone Award in 2011, has been called “one of the most rewarding Brahms recitals currently available.” Some of his previous solo recordings feature a 5-CD boxed set of his Chopin recordings, Bach’s Partitas Nos. 1, 5, and 6 and Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas, opp 14, 26, and 28. He is the recipient of two Grammy awards, for his recordings of Chopin’s complete Etudes and Bach’s English Suites Nos. 1, 3, and 6, and numerous Grammy nominations. Mr. Perahia has also won several Gramophone Awards.
Recently, Mr. Perahia embarked on an ambitious project to edit the complete Beethoven Sonatas for the Henle Urtext Edition. He also produced and edited numerous hours of recordings of recently discovered master classes by the legendary pianist, Alfred Cortot, which resulted in the highly acclaimed Sony CD release, “Alfred Cortot: The Master Classes.”
Mr. Perahia is an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music, and he holds honorary doctorates from Leeds University and Duke University. In 2004, he was awarded an honorary KBE by Her Majesty The Queen, in recognition of his outstanding service to music.
Current album
Bach: Partitas Nos. 1, 5 & 6
Artists Murray PerahiaRelease Date: 02/19/2010
His recordings with works by Bach all enjoy reference character and regularly belong to the bestsellers in the international classical music charts. "Die Zeit described Perahia's first CD with Bach's Partitas 2, 3 and 4 as "wonderfully floating, free and cantabile," while Die Welt praised this recording as having "a ravishing sense of rhythm, of the smallest delays that give the flow of notes their first vitality and spontaneity," and the leading classical music journals also gave this CD top ratings. On October 17, Perahia received the Echo Klassik 2010 for Best Solo Recording of the Year - (17th-18th Century) Piano. Now the second part is released with Perahia's recording of the Bach Partitas, and Perahia is also able to give the Partitas 1, 5 and 6 a depth and sensuality that virtually intoxicates the listener. The recording was made in the famous Nalepa Studios in Berlin, a place whose almost enchanted magic and acoustic magnificence have also been transferred to this production. "If the listener abandons himself to these processes in sound, he may rave about perfection, and Perahia's inexhaustibly blossoming design is so coherent from beginning to end, as if it could not be any other way."
"Serene, but not worldly, balanced, but never boring, always wide awake, always bringing everything to the point - this is how Perahia's sovereign Bach playing presents itself here. [ ] Perahia's Bach affords himself the unexcited-free play of forms, has nothing to prove." (WAZ) "Perahia develops his Bach from meditation, from balance. But it is not hypnosis, but surprisingly a vivification [ ] With Perahia, on the other hand, the pieces are organisms that first unfold their life before our ears. This is music that begins to grow out of nothing. The heightening that Perahia builds up, for example in the contemplative Allemande of the B-flat major Partita, seems completely simple, laconic, innocent and yet monstrous. As a listener, one thinks: this has to be like this, why doesn't anyone else do it? [...] Hardly any pianist fulfills the phases of oceanic calm in Bach's Sarabanden so maturely. Here the paradox of brilliant piano playing succeeds: complete control in lostness of the world. Perahia knows that pure Bach happiness also includes irritation." (Die Zeit) "Perahia plumbs the dances and character pieces to this point eloquently and nobly, multi-faceted and buoyant as well as with a clear weightlessness and serious depth." (Rondo) "Serene thought pieces from a master of musical devotion." (Kulturspiegel) "[...] that with an eminent sound control [...] and for his abilities of phrasing alone Perahia would have already secured a place in the pianistic Olympus. His slender tone, avoiding any tonal harshness, guarantees the listenability of each individual voice even in polyphonic interweaving [...] grippingly rhythmic [...] highly brilliant, full of lightness and southern joie de vivre." (Stereo) "If one wanted to summarize what has been said succinctly, one could say: Perahia's Bach playing aims at the greatest possible cantabile of the individual voice and at the greatest possible plasticity of the polyphonic movement. The latter gains a spatiality that, as it were, refers us back to the original source of Bach's instrumental music: to vocal polyphony." (NDR Kultur) "A reference recording without romanticizing ballast and historical dryness." (Aachener Zeitung)
