#05 Murray Perahia
WHEN I started thinking about this piece, it seemed sensible to begin with the composers Murray Perahia is most renowned for performing. The soundtrack to my teenage years was his recordings of the Mozart concertos. So, obviously, Mozart. Then Bach, Scarlatti, Beethoven — who doesn’t adore his set of the concertos with Haitink and the Concertgebouw? —Schubert, Brahms, Chopin, Schumann…In other words, such a list is pointless, other than that he focuses on the core classical repertoire.
The word specialist is limited in its use for any pianist as revered in Bach and Mozart as he is in Schumann and Chopin. And that’s the thing about Perahia. He seems to specialise in whatever he is playing. Perhaps more than with any other living pianist, with Perahia you feel you are hearing what the composer intended, rather than what Perahia thinks he intended.
Born in the Bronx in New York City in 1947, Murray Perahia’s first language was Ladino. His father came to the US from Greece in 1935. He began the piano at four but he has said it was not until he was 15 that he started taking his talent seriously. Within ten years of doing so, he had won the Leeds Piano Competition in 1972, which really began his international career. In the 1980s, Vladimir Horowitz offered to work with him, and this added a new range and timbre to his playing — and not just of the more virtuosic pieces associated with the legendary pianist.
Thank God, Perahia is now playing again — for many years in the 1990s a combination of a septic thumb followed by a bone issue in his hand prevented him playing. He spent much of that time studying Bach, which led to a series of magnificent recordings when he returned (his Goldberg Variations is an example of my point about his playing seeming to represent what the composer intended).
Since 2009 he has been president of the Jerusalem Music Centre where, among other activities, he gives regular masterclasses.
Perahia has lived in London for many years, where he is (as I discovered when I had the privilege of meeting him) a regular reader of the JC!