Mitsuko Uchida

Mitsuko Uchida, born in Atami, Japan, in 1948, is among the most revered pianists of her generation, celebrated above all as one of the supreme interpreters of the Viennese classics. She moved to Vienna as a child when her father was posted there as a diplomat, and studied at the city’s Academy of Music, absorbing the tradition at its source. International recognition came through major competitions, including a prize at the 1970 Chopin Competition in Warsaw, but it was her profound affinity for Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven that defined her career. Her recordings of Mozart’s piano sonatas and concertos, among them concertos directed from the keyboard, are landmarks of the discography, as are her searching accounts of Schubert’s late sonatas. Equally devoted to Schoenberg and Berg, she brings the same clarity and seriousness to twentieth-century music. Named a Dame of the British Empire in 2009, Uchida is admired for a playing of rare refinement, intellectual rigour, and luminous tone.