Murray Perahia’s parents, although both born in Greece, were descended from Spanish Sephardic Jews; they settled in America in the 1930s. Perahia’s father was a music lover who often took the four-year-old Murray to the opera. At six he began lessons with Jeanette Haien. He attended classes in conducting and composition at Mannes College in New York and took coaching in chamber music from Artur Balsam. The summers of his late teens were spent at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont where he worked with Rudolf Serkin and played a large amount of chamber music with Pablo Casals and members of the Budapest Quartet. At Marlboro he also met Mieczysław Horszowski, with whom he continued to study.

By the late 1960s Perahia had graduated from Mannes in conducting, but was mainly engaged as a chamber musician. He taught at Mannes for a while and became Rudolf Serkin’s teaching assistant at the Curtis Institute of Music. Even at this stage in his career, Perahia was not convinced that the life of a solo performer was for him. He enjoyed playing chamber music and conducting, and did not want to restrict himself to solo performing.

However, in 1972 Perahia played Mozart’s Piano Concerto in G major K. 453 with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under Istvan Kertesz and signed a recording contract with CBS Records; and by winning the Leeds International Piano Competition that same year he had set the course of his own career. From then on, Perahia led the life of a touring pianist playing in Britain, Canada, America, Japan, South East Asia, and Israel. He has also toured with the Academy of St Martin-inthe- Fields of whom he is guest principal conductor, as well as the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the Camerata Salzburg. His participation in the Aldeburgh Festival brought him into close contact with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, and he accompanied Pears when Britten was too ill to do so himself. In the early 1990s Perahia took a forced break of nearly two years from performing and recording as he experienced problems with his right thumb. In March 2004 he was awarded an honorary KBE and is now working on an Urtext edition of the Beethoven piano sonatas for the publisher Henle.

Perahia always takes time off to study, and is always looking to broaden his repertoire and not become associated with certain composers as he was at the beginning of his career when he played predominantly works by Chopin, Schumann and Schubert. In time, he added Beethoven, Brahms, Scarlatti and Haydn, and in the late 1980s his programmes began to include virtuoso works by Liszt and Rachmaninov due to the influence of Vladimir Horowitz from whom Perahia received advice, inspiration and friendship during the last three years of Horowitz’s life. Perahia has been keen to promote music he feels deserves exposure, such as the Sonata in E major Op. 6 by Mendelssohn; and has also played concertos by Mendelssohn, as well as those by Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Schumann and Grieg. However from the start he became associated with the piano concertos of Mozart, a complete cycle of which he recorded over nine years beginning in the late 1970s directing the English Chamber Orchestra. This set was described by Stephen Plaistow in Grove Online as ‘…a set of consistent excellence which has not been surpassed as a version on modern instruments’. Perahia’s repertoire of contemporary music reaches only as far as Bartok, yet he did play and record the Piano Sonata No. 1 by Michael Tippett.

From the beginning of his career, Perahia’s qualities as a pianist were noted by the critics who described his ‘…exceptionally incisive articulation, his liking for a translucent sound-world, his unerring sense of shape and proportion, his way of seeking expression in its purest and simplest form’. This description of his playing of Scarlatti could be applied to the majority of his interpretations. Perahia is one of the best of the post-Schnabel pianists, along with Mitsuko Uchida and Richard Goode. They all take the music they are performing with the utmost seriousness and dedication; everything Perahia learns is studied with scrupulous care and meticulous attention to detail, the structure of a composition being of the greatest importance. Perahia’s attempts to extend his repertoire into the declamatory, heroic music of the Romantic period have been less successful. His recordings of some Etudes-tableaux by Rachmaninov sound somewhat diluted of expression, and a disc of Liszt again lacks the abandon and revelry of virtuosity that these works demand, whilst the shadow of Horowitz is always present, provoking noticeable echoes of his style. However, his recording of Gnomenreigen is technically extremely impressive and the other work on the disc, Cesar Franck’s Prelude, Choral et Fugue receives an excellent rendition.

Perahia has recorded for CBS/Sony since 1972, sustaining a career by growing and improving, never relying on past glories. He has almost always received praise for his performances and recordings. Occasionally a critic will comment on his cool or unemotional playing, but this is rare. One such case was his 2003 recording of Schubert’s last three piano sonatas. A critic in The Gramophone found that ‘…while you could never say that Perahia’s understatement comes close to diffidence, his performance is much less urgently committed or lit from within than by such classic interpreters as Schnabel, Curzon, Lupu, Uchida and, most notably, Kempff.’ However all his most recent discs have received unanimous praise and are of a very high quality. In describing his recording of Bach’s ‘Goldberg’ Variations BWV 988, critic Rob Cowan felt that Perahia had surpassed himself, whilst the recording of Chopin’s etudes from 2002 had Bryce Morrison writing, ‘Faced with artistry of this calibre, criticism falls silent; one can only listen and wonder at such unalloyed perfection.’ Latterly, Perahia has recorded much Bach; in addition to the ‘Goldberg’ Variations he has recorded the complete English Suites and the keyboard concertos with the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, whom he conducts from the keyboard.

One of his first discs, recorded in 1974, was of Chopin’s piano sonatas. There is some very fine playing in these recordings, and Perahia’s talent is evident, but his continuing growth in stature as an artist has shown that his interpretation of Chopin has consistently evolved. A disc of the four impromptus, Fantaisie Op. 49, Berceuse Op. 57 and Barcarolle Op. 60 are far more fluent than the sonatas, whilst another disc, which is of exceptional quality, is a Chopin recital from 1994 where Perahia plays all four ballades and some waltzes, nocturnes, mazurkas and etudes. The Ballade No. 3 in A flat Op. 47 is particularly fine with Perahia using rubato with exemplary taste throughout. His shading of dynamics in the Mazurka in A minor Op. 17 No. 4 is extraordinarily poetic and a pleasure to hear.

Highlights from the 1980s include a disc of Schubert impromptus, although here at times Perahia’s attention to detail can sound over-fastidious. Of the concerto repertoire, apart from Mozart, Perahia has recorded both Mendelssohn concertos, both Chopin concertos, the Grieg and Schumann concertos and the five concertos by Beethoven. The Beethoven concertos with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and Bernard Haitink are particularly fine, especially No. 4 in G major Op. 58.

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