Artur Pizarro began to study the piano at the age of three with Sequeira Costa and at four performed on Portuguese television. He also studied with Costa in America, at the University of Kansas where he spent his teenage years. He made his professional debut at the age of thirteen and at nineteen won the Vianna da Motta International Competition in Lisbon. The following year Pizarro was a prizewinner at the Greater Palm Beach International Competition in Florida, but it was his winning of the first prize at the 1990 Leeds International Piano Competition that launched his international career. He has since performed in Japan, Hong Kong, Canada, Europe, Australia and America.

Pizarro has played with many of the world’s leading orchestras including the Philadelphia, Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Symphony, Royal Philharmonic, BBC Symphony and Leipzig Chamber Orchestras. In 1992 he toured Australia with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and four years later toured Belgium and Germany with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He has worked with conductors including Charles Dutoit, Yuri Temirkanov, Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos and Simon Rattle. Pizarro regularly plays chamber music with partners including the Endellion String Quartet, the Lindsay String Quartet, violinist Raphael Oleg, cellist Truls Mork and clarinettist Michael Collins. He also frequently gives master-classes and serves on juries of major piano competitions.

Pizarro has a wide repertoire based on the Romantics. He is a sensitive musician who highlights the lyrical side of virtuoso works. As critic Edward Greenfield wrote in The Guardian, ‘…what really magnetises most about him is his magic ability to illuminate a lyrical phrase, to play with the sort of repose that as a rule comes only with age and experience. Pizarro’s maturity is astonishing.’ He plays Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Scriabin, Rachmaninov, Shostakovich and Kabalevsky and has recorded Spanish music by Rodrigo, Mompou, Cassado, Falla, Granados, Albeniz and Infante. In Britain during the 1990s he played a great deal of unusual repertoire including the Piano Sonata by Paul Dukas, Schnittke’s Piano Concerto and music from Stravinsky’s Firebird arranged for piano by Guido Agosti; and he has performed Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen and Debussy’s En blanc et noir with Stephen Coombs.

Pizarro waited two years after his win at Leeds before entering the recording studio. His first disc was a Liszt recital including the Piano Sonata in B minor. His first recordings were made for Collins Classics for whom he recorded nine solo compact discs. Unusual and enterprising repertoire makes all of Pizarro’s discs interesting. He has recorded two discs of works by Czech composer Jan Vaclav Vořišek which received excellent reviews and contain some fascinating music, particularly the twelve Rhapsodies Op. 1. Another disc contains three piano sonatas by Kabalevsky whilst another couples Scriabin’s twenty-four Preludes Op. 11 with Shostakovich’s twenty-four Preludes Op. 34. Another disc of Scriabin contains the complete mazurkas. Two discs of Spanish music are particularly fine, one of Rodrigo now on Naxos, whose Cuatro piezas para piano in particular are delivered with warmth and clarity, and the other of Mompou. Although the Mompou was entitled The Piano Works Volume 1 when it appeared in 1998, it would unfortunately appear that no further volumes are to follow as Collins Classics ceased trading as a company.

With the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra and Martyn Brabbins, Pizarro recorded Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor Op. 30 and the Piano Concerto Op. 20 by Scriabin. Pizarro is ideal in the Scriabin, but the Rachmaninov is given a rather sober performance which is sometimes less than dynamic. Apparently, Pizarro’s prizewinning performance of this work at the Leeds competition was far more exciting. His performance at the same competition of Rachmaninov’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor Op. 36 certainly was stunning, while his reading of Debussy’s Children’s Corner Suite was delightful for its clarity and delicacy.

Another concerto recording is part of Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto Series for which Pizarro made the first recording of the Piano Concerto by his compatriot Jose Vianna da Motta. Also for Hyperion, he has recorded an excellent disc of music for two pianists by Milhaud where he is partnered by Stephen Coombs.

In 2003 Pizarro performed the complete Beethoven piano sonatas in London. He had previously performed the cycle in Kansas in 1998 and Portugal in 2001. In preparation, he listened to as many recordings of the complete cycle as possible. He found the most interesting to be from the 1930s to the 1950s: those played by Kempff, Schnabel, Solomon, Brendel and Horszowski. The Scottish record company Linn asked Pizarro to record four of the piano sonatas and he chose the ‘Moonlight’, ‘Appassionata’, ‘Tempest’ and ‘Pathetique’. He also decided to record them on a Bluthner piano. The disc received excellent reviews and it is certainly one of the most interesting of recent recordings of Beethoven sonatas. Pizarro does not bow at the shrine of Beethoven and treat the works with an unhealthily holy reverence; rather, he plays them for all they are worth. As one critic wrote, ‘The fires … are raised to fever pitch, conveyed with an unfaltering assurance and sheer musical character.’

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — Jonathan Summers (A–Z of Pianists, Naxos 8.558107–10).