A piano legend died today

The great Italian pianist Maria Tipo died this morning in Florence, in her daughter Alina’s arms. Maria was 93.

Winner of the 1949 Geneva Competition, she went on to play with many of the world’s great orchestras while also passing on a particular Italian tradition to her students at the Fiesole School of Music and the Cherubini Conservatorio.

UPDATE: Martha Argerich plays homage

Her family said: ‘In an age when being a concert pianist meant a woman had to measure herself daily with an almost exclusively male world, Maria Tipo crossed the stages of the greatest theatres leaving the mark of her unforgettable interpretations (Arthur Rubinstein had defined her “the most extraordinary talent of our era”), fortunately delivered to a rich discography. Her choices of repertoire, original and innovative (she was the first to propose in Italy, at the beginning of the ’60s, the complete performance of the Goldberg Variations by Johann Sebastian Bach) were exalted by a pianism of unmistakable and profound expressive cantability, in which the absolute technical mastery is always at the service of an extraordinary narrative imagination, while fully respecting the score’.

The pianist Andrea Lucchesini writes:
Being welcomed into your class as a 6 year old was a great privilege, and I will be forever grateful for everything you gave me. Today we say goodbye to Maria Tipo with much sadness; we are left with precious memories, her great music to the whole world.