Иво Погорелич

Eliminated in the third round of the 1980 Chopin Competition in Warsaw, Ivo Pogorelić acquired an international reputation: Martha Argerich resigned from the jury in protest, calling him a genius. Born in Belgrade in 1958 and Croatian, he had begun the piano at seven, was sent at twelve to the Central Music School in Moscow, studied at the Conservatory there with Vera Gornostayeva and Yevgeny Malinin, and from 1976 worked intensively with the Georgian pianist Alisa Kezeradze, the decisive influence on his playing. Prizes at Terni in 1978 and Montreal in 1980 came before Warsaw; Carnegie Hall followed in 1981. His Deutsche Grammophon records include Bach, the Chopin sonatas and preludes, Beethoven, Liszt, Schumann, Ravel, Prokofiev and Scriabin, and later releases came from Sony Classical. He was made a UNESCO goodwill ambassador in 1988, the first pianist so appointed, and in 2019 issued an album of Beethoven and Rachmaninoff for Sony Classical. He gave his first recital at ten and won the Zagreb competition in 1975, which brought a first record for Jugoton of Debussy, Prokofiev and Kelemen; he became an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist in 1982. In 1986 he set up a fund for young musicians in Zagreb and in 1989 a festival of his own at Bad Wörishofen that ran for nine years, and the label's 2015 edition of his recordings from 1981 to 1998 received the Diapason d'Or, with an album of late Chopin following in 2022.