Maria João Pires

Winner in 1970 of the Beethoven Bicentennial Competition in Brussels, the prize that opened her international career, Pires had by then been performing for two decades: Mozart concertos in public at seven. She studied with Campos Coelho in Lisbon, then with Rosl Schmid in Munich and Karl Engel in Hanover, and signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon in 1989, recording a discography built around Mozart, Schubert, Chopin and Schumann — including the nocturnes. Her later Onyx recording of the Beethoven concertos with Daniel Harding took a Gramophone award in 2015. Her educational work included the Belgais Centre for the Study of the Arts, founded in the Portuguese interior in 1999, and the Partitura projects, which place established musicians on stage beside young ones. In 2025 she announced that she had retired from performing. Born in Lisbon in 1944, she was given the National Award for Young Musicians at nine and studied with Francine Benoît as well as Campos Coelho; fifteen years of recording for Erato preceded the Deutsche Grammophon years, which have been gathered into an edition of thirty-eight discs. The Partitura work began in Belgium in 2012, with workshops and with choirs for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, among them the Hesperos Choir, and the hall at Belgais has concerts and recordings of its own. The University of Évora awarded her an honorary doctorate in May 2026.