Maria Curcio
Maria Curcio ( born August 27, 1918 in Naples, † March 30, 2009 in Porto ), a pupil of the pianist Artur Schnabel, worked in London and around the world as a piano teacher.
Life and work
Maria Curcio was the daughter of an Italian father and a Brazilian mother. With three years she received her first piano lessons from his mother, five year she has already performed for neighbors and family friends. More teachers in Italy were Alfredo Casella and Carlo Zecchi; Curcio did, however, especially as a student of pianist Artur Schnabel. Schnabel rarely taught children or adolescents; the mediation of his son Karl -Ulrich, the fifteen- year-old could imagine, however, and initially received instruction in Schnabel's house on Lake Como, and later in European cities, where the paths of the two have crossed paths.
In February 1939 at the age of twenty, she performed at London's Aeolian Hall. The program included works by Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Stravinsky ( the Curcio as a student of Nadia Boulanger had met in Paris); The Times of London praised the " Latin clarity " of their game.
The beginning of World War II meant the temporary end of all professional aspirations. Curcio followed Peter Diamand, Schnabel's Jewish- Austrian secretary, to Amsterdam, where the two were hiding from the Nazis, sometimes in attics. Diamand was picked up and temporarily detained in a concentration camp on Dutch territory. Maria Curcio was very weak when the war ended due to malnutrition and tuberculosis and partially paralyzed, and it took several years for them to go back and could play the piano.
As a concert pianist, she has performed with conductors such as Otto Klemperer and Carlo Maria Giulini and accompanied the violinist Szimon Goldberg, cellist Raphael Lanes and the singer Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. However, in 1963 she gave her last concert and began to concentrate on teaching.
1948 had Curcio Diamand and married. Around the same time had become Diamand director of the Holland Festival; In 1965 he took over the management of the Edinburgh Festival. In 1972, the marriage ended in divorce, but the good agreement was always obtained.
From 1965 lived Curcio in London and gained an international reputation as an exceptionally good and successful piano teacher. She gave master classes, especially at the Paris Conservatoire and at the Jerusalem Music Center, but also in Germany, Spain, Greece and Japan, Brazil, Venezuela, Canada and the United States. With Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears they shared a long friendship. From 1996 she was a visiting professor at the London Royal Academy of Music; her last years spent Maria Curcio near Porto, where she was cared for by her former housekeeper.
"Few who are outside the world of classical music, have heard of (...) Maria Curcio, but within this world she is a legend (...)"
Student
Maria Curcio was musical consultant of pianists such as Martha Argerich, Leon Fleisher, Claude Frank and Radu Lupu. Were among their students ( in alphabetical order) Pierre -Laurent Aimard, Saleem Abboud Ashkar, Douglas Ashley, Kim Barber, Angela Brownridge, Chiao- Ying Chang, Eric Chumachenco, Barry Douglas, Julian Evans, Peter Frankl, Sam Haywood, Seung- Yeun huh, Niel Immelman, Terence Judd, Alfredo Perl, José Maria Pinzolas, Hiromi Okada, Rafael Orozco, Eric Le Sage, Sergio Daniel Tiempo, Mitsuko Uchida and Bob Versteegh.