Nelson José Pinto Freire (; 18 October 1944 - 1 November 2021) was a Brazilian classical pianist.
A child prodigy from Minas Gerais, Freire studied in Rio de Janeiro and Vienna before winning the Vianna da Motta International Music Competition in 1964. He played music from Bach and Beethoven to Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Debussy, Liszt and Brazilian composers. Romantic music formed much of his concert and recorded repertory.
He performed with orchestras in Europe, the Americas and Asia, working with conductors including Pierre Boulez, Riccardo Chailly, Charles Dutoit, Valery Gergiev, Eugen Jochum, Lorin Maazel, Kurt Masur, Seiji Ozawa and André Previn. Martha Argerich was one of his closest friends and his most frequent piano-duo partner.
Freire recorded for CBS/Columbia, Sony, Teldec, Philips, Decca, Deutsche Grammophon and Berlin Classics. His recordings received the Edison Award, the Gramophone Award, the Diapason d'Or, the ECHO Klassik and a Latin Grammy Award. He was nominated three times for a Grammy Award.
Early life and education
Freire was born in Boa Esperança, Minas Gerais, on 18 October 1944. His family had a piano at home, and as a small child he began playing by ear, imitating music played by his older sister Nelma. Concert biographies usually date the beginning of his piano studies to the age of three, although Freire later remembered beginning to play at four. His first public performance came in childhood, when he played Mozart's Piano Sonata in A major, K. 331.
Before the family moved to Rio de Janeiro, Freire travelled once a week to study with a teacher who lived hours from Boa Esperança. After a short period, the teacher told his parents that he needed more advanced instruction in Rio, then the Brazilian capital. The family moved there when he was about six. His father left his pharmacy in Boa Esperança and took a bank job so that Freire could continue studying in the city.
In Rio, Freire studied with Lúcia Branco and Nise Obino. Branco had studied with Arthur De Greef, a pupil of Franz Liszt, while Obino had been Branco's pupil and assistant. Freire later credited Obino with rebuilding his technique from the beginning, including the position of his hands at the keyboard. He remembered her as the teacher who most changed his playing during childhood. His parents kept him in ordinary school, and he later recalled practising only a few hours a day instead of spending his childhood wholly at the piano.
In 1957, at the age of twelve, Freire played Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5, the "Emperor", at the Rio de Janeiro International Piano Competition. Competing against older pianists, he reached the final round. His performance brought him a Brazilian government scholarship for study abroad. He chose Vienna to study with Bruno Seidlhofer, whose pupils included Friedrich Gulda.
Freire left for Vienna at fourteen. He travelled with Seidlhofer and, for the first time, lived outside Brazil without his parents. In Vienna he met Martha Argerich, who became a lifelong friend and musical partner.
Career
Early international career
Freire began performing internationally in 1959 while still in his teens. His early engagements took him through Europe, the United States, Central and South America, Japan and Israel. In 1964 he shared first prize with Vladimir Krainev at the Vianna da Motta International Music Competition in Lisbon. He also received the Dinu Lipatti and Harriet Cohen medals in London.
The Lisbon prize opened a steady run of engagements abroad. Freire replaced Alexander Brailowsky in Mexico and gave his first concerts in Spain in 1965, playing in Valencia, Elche, Madrid and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. He made his London debut at twenty-three and appeared with the New York Philharmonic in New York the following year. Concerto broadcasts and later reissues from those years include music by Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Grieg, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev.
Orchestras, conductors and recital work
Freire spent the next decades moving between solo recitals, concertos and chamber music. In Europe he played with the Berlin Philharmonic, Gewandhaus Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Vienna Symphony, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, Orchestre National de France, Orchestre de Paris, Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.
His appearances in the Americas included concerts with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Montreal Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic and Philadelphia Orchestra. He also played with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra and the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo.
Among the conductors he worked with were Pierre Boulez, Riccardo Chailly, Myung-whun Chung, Colin Davis, Charles Dutoit, Valery Gergiev, Eugen Jochum, Rafael Kubelík, Rudolf Kempe, Fabio Luisi, Lorin Maazel, Kurt Masur, Ingo Metzmacher, Václav Neumann, Seiji Ozawa, André Previn, Yuri Temirkanov and David Zinman. Freire toured the United States and Germany with Kempe and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He later spoke warmly of his work with Chailly, Gergiev and Temirkanov.
His recital programmes moved freely between Classical and Romantic works, French and Russian composers, and music from Brazil. A 1984 recital in Miami paired Mozart, Chopin and Debussy with Villa-Lobos, Albéniz, Godowsky and Rachmaninoff. For a seventy-fifth birthday recital at the Concertgebouw, he played Scarlatti, Godowsky, Handel, Brahms, Liszt and Grieg. Shorter pieces often sat beside large sonatas and other substantial works, and he frequently used miniatures as encores.
Festivals, competitions and public engagements
Freire first played at the BBC Proms in 2005, performing Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 with Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. He returned in 2012 with the São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra and Marin Alsop, playing Villa-Lobos's Momoprécoce. The following year, Freire joined the orchestra on a European tour through 13 cities in six countries, with concerts at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, the Royal Festival Hall in London and the Berliner Philharmonie.
In Brazil, Freire took part in events for the bicentenary of Chopin's birth. On 13 March 2010 he played at Sala São Paulo with the Filarmônica Brasileira under Cláudio Cruz in the opening concert of the Ano Chopin no Brasil. He also sat on the jury of the XVI International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw that year, when Yulianna Avdeeva won first prize.
Freire had already worked as a competition juror elsewhere. In 2001 he presided over the jury of the Concours international Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud in Paris. He was due to serve on the jury of the XVIII International Chopin Piano Competition in 2021, but illness forced him to withdraw. Arthur Moreira Lima replaced him.
In 2011 Freire cancelled a planned appearance with the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra and Roberto Minczuk in support of musicians who had been dismissed from the orchestra.
Collaboration with Martha Argerich
Freire met Martha Argerich in Vienna when they were young pianists. Their friendship lasted for the rest of his life and developed into his longest piano-duo partnership. They played together in London in 1968, and their duo concerts became more frequent from the 1980s.
A filmed 1982 programme placed solo music beside two-piano works by Ravel and Rachmaninoff. In 2000 Freire joined Argerich at Carnegie Hall, playing Ravel with her in a programme that also paired Argerich with the Juilliard String Quartet.
They toured Japan in 2003, Brazil and Argentina in 2004, and North America in 2005. Their repertory for two pianos included Rachmaninoff's Suite No. 2, Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Ravel's La valse and Lutosławski's Variations on a Theme by Paganini. Deutsche Grammophon released a live recording from the Salzburg Festival. Nicholas Kenyon, reviewing the album in The Observer, praised the balance and responsiveness between the two pianists.
When Freire withdrew from the 2021 Chopin Competition jury because of illness, Argerich also withdrew. She travelled to Brazil during his final illness.
Later career
Freire continued performing and recording through his seventies. Decca issued a succession of new albums during the 2000s and 2010s, bringing much of the repertory he had played for decades into new studio recordings. In 2016 the Federal University of Minas Gerais awarded him an honorary doctorate during the university's ninetieth-anniversary commemorations. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Classical Music Awards and the Konex Mercosur Prize in 2019.
At Carnegie Hall in 2018, Freire appeared with the Grand Rapids Symphony under Marcelo Lehninger, playing Villa-Lobos's Momoprécoce and de Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain. A fall in Rio de Janeiro in 2019 fractured his right humerus and forced him to cancel performances. He planned to return to the stage in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic delayed those plans.
Recordings
Freire recorded less frequently than many pianists with comparable concert careers and often said he preferred the immediacy of playing before an audience. His commercial discography nevertheless spans CBS/Columbia, Sony Classical, Teldec, Philips, Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, Berlin Classics, IPAM and London. Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Beethoven, Debussy and Liszt make up much of the recorded repertory, alongside Brazilian music, Bach and collections of shorter pieces.
His early CBS/Columbia recordings included concertos and solo works that returned decades later in digital reissues. Sony Classical collected much of this material in Nelson Freire: The Complete Columbia Album Collection in 2014. The set includes concertos by Tchaikovsky, Grieg and Schumann and Liszt's Totentanz, recorded with the Munich Philharmonic under Rudolf Kempe, as well as solo music by Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, Chopin and Liszt. His CBS recording of Chopin's 24 Préludes received the Prix Edison.
Freire also recorded Chopin for Teldec and Telefunken. Warner Classics later gathered these early performances as Nelson Freire Plays Chopin, including nocturnes, scherzos and other works. The Teldec album Chopin: Nocturnes & Fantasie paired ten nocturnes with the Fantaisie in F minor, Op. 49. Other Warner and Apex reissues included the four scherzos, the Heroic Polonaise, the Third Ballade and the Berceuse.
Philips included Freire in its Great Pianists of the 20th Century series in 1999. His recordings from this period also circulated on IPAM and London, alongside earlier studio and archival material.
In October 2001, Freire signed an exclusive contract with Decca. His first releases for the label began a sustained return to studio recording. A 2002 Chopin album paired the Piano Sonata No. 3 with the twelve études of Op. 25 and the Trois nouvelles études. It received the Diapason d'Or, the Grand Prix de l'Académie Charles Cros and a Choc from Le Monde de la musique. His next Decca Chopin album, released in 2005, included the twelve études of Op. 10, the Barcarolle and the Piano Sonata No. 2. It received a Grammy nomination.