Maria Curcio ( Italian: Maria Curcio ; August 27, 1918 , Naples - March 30, 2009 , Porto ) is an Italian-British pianist, an outstanding music teacher.
| Maria Kurcho ital. Maria curcio | |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | |
| Place of Birth | |
| Date of death | |
| A place of death | |
| A country |  Italy  United Kingdom |
| Professions | pianist , music teacher |
| Instruments | the piano |
Content
- 1 Biography
- 2 Teaching
- 3 Sources
- 4 References
Biography
Father is Italian, mother is of Brazilian-Jewish descent, pianist. Maria has been playing the piano since she was three years old. She studied with Carlo Tsecci and Alfredo Casella , with Nadia Boulanger , took private lessons from Arthur Schnabel and considers herself, first of all, his student and successor. In the 1930s began a concert career, performed with violinist Shimon Goldberg , accompanied by singer Elizabeth Schwarzkopf . She became close to Schnabel’s secretary Peter Diamand , later a prominent music administrator, from the second half of the 1930s. lived with him in the Netherlands (they married in 1948 ). During the war, Diamand, as a Jew, was arrested by the Nazi authorities, sent to a concentration camp, where he managed to escape, and hid for a long time. From the malnutrition and tuberculosis of the war years, Kurcho developed a disorder of the motor apparatus, she could not walk and play in public, so she focused on her teaching career. In the second half of the 1950s, the pianist's health was restored, she returned to public speaking (the last of them took place in 1963 ). Since 1965, she lived and worked in the UK, where her husband led the music festival in Edinburgh . She was friends with singer Peter Pierce , with Britten , who helped the spouses move to London , often playing four hands with him.
Kurcho and Diamand divorced in 1971 . The last years of her life she spent in Porto.
According to Michael Church, a music columnist for The Independent ,
very few people outside of the world of classical music have heard of Maria Kurcho, but inside this world she is a legend: the beloved student of Schnabel, the muse of Rafael Orozco and Radu Lupu and the incomparable mentor and keeper of young talents ( English a tutelary goddess second to none ) [1] .
Teaching
Most of the private students of Kurcho include Leon Fleischer , Barry Douglas , Rafael Orozco , Marta Argerich , Radu Lupu , Pierre Laurent Emar , Jong Myung Hoon , Marie Joseph Judah , Mitsuko Utida , Jose Fegali , Alfredo Pearl , Sergio Tiempo Eugene Sudbin , Ashley Woss and others. Ignat Solzhenitsyn also studied with her - according to his father, Alexander Solzhenitsyn , “reveling in lessons from Maria Kurcho” [2] . Kurcho’s work is dedicated to Douglas Ashley’s book, “Music Beyond Sound: Maria Kurcho, the Teacher of Great Pianists” ( Music Beyond Sound: Maria Curcio, a Teacher of Great Pianists ; 1993 ).
Sources
- ↑ Maria Curcio: “My task is to liberate pianists” // The Independent, February 2, 2001.
- ↑ Solzhenitsyn A. Pleased with a grain between two millstones: Essays on exile. Part Four (1987-1994) // New World. - 2003. - No. 11.