A member of a musical family, Martino Tirimo made his debut in public in Cyprus at the age of seven and conducted seven performances of Verdi’s La traviata with the Italian Opera Festival in Cyprus at the age of twelve. At sixteen Tirimo won a Liszt Scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he won eleven other prizes. He studied piano with Franz Reizenstein in London and completed his studies at the Vienna Academy. Tirimo also studied with Gordon Green and at the Royal Academy in January 1963 performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor K. 466 with the student orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbirolli. He made his London debut at the age of twenty-three at the Wigmore Hall, opening his recital with Beethoven’s ‘Diabelli’Variations Op. 120 and continuing with Debussy’s Images, Stravinsky’s Piano Sonata and Chopin’s Scherzo No. 4 in E major Op. 54. The early 1970s saw Tirimo winning competitions in Munich and Geneva and appearing with many major orchestras, working with conductors such as Adrian Boult, Kurt Masur, Simon Rattle and Kurt Sanderling. After his London debut Tirimo appeared throughout the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, Canada, South Africa and the Far East.

In 1975 Tirimo was apparently the first to perform a complete cycle of Schubert’s piano sonatas in public in London, repeating the event ten years later. He has published an Urtext edition of these works, completing unfinished movements. He was also one of the first pianists to direct all of Beethoven’s piano concertos from the keyboard, performing this cycle in Dresden with the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra in 1985 and repeating the cycle in London a year later with the same orchestra.

With a repertoire extending from Bach to Tippett, Tirimo plays over fifty concertos. Recently, he has performed the complete piano sonatas of Beethoven and a series of recitals of music by Robert and Clara Schumann. He has also composed a score for the eight-episode Channel Four television series Odyssey.

Tirimo’s main recordings are those of the complete Schubert piano sonatas, which he recorded for EMI Eminence in the mid 1990s, and the complete solo piano music of Debussy, recorded for Pickwick IMP Carlton Classics in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the Schubert sonatas Tirimo includes his own completions of unfinished movements and brings the eye and ear of a scholar to his readings, in which he sustains a wonderful warm tone, helped by the reverberant acoustic of the recording locations. Probably his most well known disc is a coupling of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 Op. 18 and Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini Op. 43. It was the first digital recording of these two favourites, and when it was issued at bargain price in 1982 Trevor Harvey in The Gramophone wrote, ‘I shall simply say that I enjoyed both performances enormously…This is an exciting and compelling recording and obviously leads the field.’ Tirimo has recorded spacious readings of both piano concertos by Brahms for EMI with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Kurt Sanderling, and elegant and polished performances of both piano concertos by Chopin with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Fedor Gluschenko for Conifer. In 1987 Tirimo recorded a recital of favourite encores for Kingdom Records entitled Masterpieces in Miniature in which he plays, amongst others, Liszt’s Étude de concert Un Sospiro and the Paraphrase on Verdi’s Rigoletto.

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