Magda Tagliaferro

Magda Tagliaferro ( born January 19, 1893 in Petrópolis, † September 9, 1986 in Rio de Janeiro) was a Franco- Brazilian pianist of German descent.

Tagliaferro had first lessons from her father, a student of Raoul Pugno and Professor of Voice and Piano. In 1906 she came with her family to France and became a student at the Conservatoire de Paris. She studied with Antonin Marmontel and was promoted by Gabriel Fauré, the director of the Conservatoire.

After studying at the Conservatoire she became a student of Alfred Cortot. She joined with Jacques Thibaud and Pablo Casals on, played piano duets with Édouard Risler and Gabriel Fauré and worked as a chamber musician with the violinist Jules Boucherit. Two concert tours she made with George Enescu.

In Paris, she performed in the salon Polignac, where musicians like Clara Haskil and Jacques Février were heard. She was known with Maurice Ravel, Vincent d' Indy, Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud and friends with Reynaldo Hahn, who dedicated his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra.

Before the seizure of power Francos she made several tours through Spain. For the world premiere recording of a work by Frederic Mompou, she received the Grand Prix du Disque. She played also the first recording of Fauré's Ballade for piano and orchestra. Heitor Villa -Lobos dedicated her Momoprecoce, a fantasy for piano and orchestra, which she premiered in Paris in 1929 and recorded in the 1950s with the composer on board.

From 1937 to 1939 taught at the Conservatoire de Paris Tagliaferro; the technique that she taught her students became known as Tagliaferro Technique. During the Second World War, she first went to the USA, where she sang in the Town Hall in New York and Carnegie Hall occurred ( under John Barbirolli ), and then to Brazil. There she gave concerts in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and founded his own music school. Under their guidance there were their assistants Nellie Braga, Lina Pires de Campos, Edda Fiore, Maria Eliza Figueiredo, José Elias Zulmira, Georgette Pereira, Menininha Lobo and Helena Plaut from a generation of young pianists.

1949 Tagliaferro returned back to Paris. The follow Cortot at the École Nationale de Musique she refused here and instead founded a music school. She also founded the Magda Tagliaferro International Piano Competition, whose winners also her student Cristina Ortiz scored, and was several times a juror at the prestigious Chopin Competition in Warsaw.

Her students included, inter alia, the Brazilian Flavio Varani, Cristina Ortiz, Caio Pagano, Daisy de Luca, Eudoxia de Barros and Isabel Mourão and Pnina Salzman, Jorge Luis Prats, James Tocco and Daniel Varsano.

At the suggestion of the music critic Harold Schonberg Tagliaferro was invited in 1979 to a concert at Carnegie Hall, where she played with great success Schumann's Carnaval. Schonberg wrote: "This listener does not honestly remember when He Has more enjoyed a Carnaval. In its improvisatory quality, its infallible rhythm and perfect pacing, what it the essence of Schumann. " Even at 90 years old she joined in January 1983 in a concert at London's Wigmore Hall, an event that the BBC has documented on tape.

Also at this time she played with her ​​student Daniel Varsano a recording of Fauré's Dolly Suite and his ballad in a version for two pianos, which was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque. She made her last public concert aged 92 a year before her death.

François Reichenbach made ​​a documentary about Tagliaferro, which was still unfinished at the time of her death, but was shown in France and Brazil under the title Magda Noble et sentimental. The Fundação Magda Tagliaferro maintains a museum in São Paulo and awards scholarships to talented young musicians.