life & career
Born in Boa Esperança, Brazil, Nelson Freire began piano lessons at the age of three with Nise Obino and Lucia Branco, who had worked with a pupil of Liszt. He made his first public appearance at the age of five playing Mozart’s Sonata in A, K. 331. In 1957, after winning a grant at the Rio de Janeiro International Piano Competition with Beethoven’s “Emperor”Concerto, he went to Vienna to study with Bruno Seidlhofer, teacher of Friedrich Gulda. Seven years later he won the Dinu Lipatti Medal in London and first prize at the International Vianna da Motta Competition in Lisbon.
Since his international career began in 1959, Freire has appeared in virtually every important musical centre, collaborating with such distinguished conductors as Jirí Belohlávek, Pierre Boulez, Riccardo Chailly, Myung-Whun Chung, Sir Colin Davis, Charles Dutoit, Valery Gergiev, Eugen Jochum, Rudolf Kempe, Fabio Luisi, Lorin Maazel, Kurt Masur, Ingo Metzmacher, Václav Neumann, Seiji Ozawa, André Previn, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Yuri Temirkanov, David Zinman, Hugh Wolff and orchestras including the Berliner Philharmoniker, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Munich Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony, Royal Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Danish Radio Symphony, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Tonhalle Orchestra of Zurich, Vienna Symphony, Royal Philharmonic, London Symphony, BBC Scottish Symphony, BBC Symphony, Israel Philharmonic, Czech Philharmonic, Seoul Philharmonic, Orchestre National de France, Orchestre de Paris, Radio France Philharmonic, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, as well as the leading North American orchestras of Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York and Philadelphia. With Martha Argerich, he toured Japan in 2003, Brazil and Argentina in 2004 and the USA and Canada in 2005.
Freire has an extensive discography and was included by Philips in its historic series Great Pianists of the 20th Century, released in 1999. He has been an exclusive Decca artist since 2001, thus far recording Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann and Debussy, as well as the two Brahms Concertos with the Gewandhaus Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly, which was hailed by Gramophone as “the Brahms piano concerto set we’ve been waiting for” and has earned international prizes including the 2007 Classic FM Gramophone Award as “Record of the Year” and “Winner of the Concerto Category”, Diapason d’or, Grand Prix de l’Académie Charles Cros and Choc du Monde de la musique as well as a Grammy® nomination. 2011 sees the release of Harmonies du Soir, an all-Liszt album.
In March 2007, Nelson Freire was appointed a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.
