In 2018, Classic FM published a list of the
25 greatest pianists of all time. In February of 2019, Classical-music.com published their list of the
20 greatest pianists of all time. Of course, there are quite a few of these lists and all the lists seem very different. I think I prefer the Classic FM list as it includes Liszt and Clara Schumann. However, those lists are simply interesting speculations, after all Liszt and Clara never made any recordings, how could anyone ever truly venture such opinions.
There are just as many opinions and articles about who should be on the list for the best living concert pianists. Here are some of my favorite pianists that are alive today.
CLASSICAL PIANISTS:
Lang Lang is a Chinese concert pianist currently living in New York City. His performance style has been criticized as being flamboyant and he has also been described as the J.Lo of the piano. Lang Lang is one the most popular and accessible classical pianist of our time.
Martha Argerich is an Argentine pianist born in 1941. She avoids publicity, but is acknowledged as one of the great pianists of our time. Argerich has often remarked in interviews of feeling "lonely" on stage during solo performances. She is noted for her recordings of 20th century concerto works.
Daniel Barenboim was born in Argentine in 1942 from Jewish Russian parents. He is a citizen of Argentine, Israel, Palestine, and Spain and lives in Berlin. Barenboim has rejected the current authentic performance movement and argues instead for finding the tempo of a piece from within the music. He is a noted interpreter of Beethoven and a world famous pianist and conductor.
Mitsuko Uchida is a Japanese born British pianist acclaimed for her Mozart recordings. She is regarded as one of the finest contemporary pianists and has recently turned to conducting major orchestras.
Christoph Eschenbach is a German born pianist and conductor. He was orphaned during World War II. His mother died giving birth to him; his father, a politically active anti-Nazi, was sent to the Eastern front as part of a Nazi punishment battalion where he was killed. As a result of this trauma, Eschenbach did not speak for a year, until he was asked if he wanted to play music. He has made more than 80 recordings as a pianist, conductor, or both.
Katja and Marielle Labeque are French sisters who are a highly acclaimed piano duo. True celebrity arrived for the sisters when their 1980 two-piano recording of Gershwin's
Rhapsody in Blue sold over a half million copies. Beyond the traditional classical repertoire, their repertoire extends contemporary classical music, jazz, ragtime, flamenco, minimal music, baroque music on period instruments, and even pop music and experimental rock.
Zoltan Kocsis is a Hungarian pianist, conductor, arranger, and composer. He is known for his interpretation of Bela Bartok and won a grammy for his interpretation of Debussy's Images.
Vladimir Ashkenazy is a Russian born pianist and conductor, currently residing and a citizen of Iceland. He is currently Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Ashkenazy is most famous for his interpretation of Russian and Romantic composers.
Aldo Ciccolini was born in Naples, Italy. His father, who bore the title of Marquis of Macerara, worked as a typographer. He began his performing career playing at the Teatro San Carlo at the age of 16. However, by 1946 he was reduced to playing in bars to support his family. He became a French citizen in 1969 and taught at the Conservatoire de Paris. Ciccolini is a celebrated interpreter and advocate of the piano music of the French composers Camille Saint-Saëns, Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy and Erik Satie.
Nikolai Kapustin is a Ukrainian Russian pianist and composer. During the 1950s he acquired a reputation as a jazz pianist, arranger and composer. He is steeped, therefore, in both the traditions of classical virtuoso pianism and improvisational jazz. Kapustin regards himself as a composer rather than a jazz musician. He has said, "I was never a jazz musician. I never tried to be a real jazz pianist, but I had to do it because of the composing.
Jeno Jando is a Hungarian pianist and Professor of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, Hungary. Jandó enjoys being both a solo and accompanying artist. He is known for singing while playing, and to stop this, he puts an unlit cigarette in his mouth.
Alfred Brendel is an Austrian pianist, poet, artist, and author. He was born in the Czech republic to a non-musical family and had to dig trenches in Yugoslavia in WWII until he developed frostbite and was hospitalized. Brendel is regarded as one of the most thoughtful interpreters of classical Germanic works by such composers as Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart.
Evgeny Kissin is a Russian classical pianist famous for his interpretations of Liszt and the Romantic repertoire. He was a child prodigy who entered the Gnessin State Musical College at the age of six where he only ever had one music teacher.
Ingrid Fliter is an Argentinian pianist who now lives in New York and Europe. She is known for her effortless technique and sensitive interpretations. She is one of the few concert pianists that will have music on the stand during her concerts.
Murray Perahia is an American composer and pianist. Perahia may have started playing the plano when he was just four but it wasn't until the age of 15 that, he says, he became seriously interested in music. In 1972 he became the first North American to win the Leeds Piano Competition. In 1992 a bone abnormality caused his hand to swell and forced him to take some time off from performing. It was during this time that he found solace in the music of J.S. Bach. His Bach recordings are regarded as some of the best ever made.
Andras Schiff is a Hungarian-born Austro-British classical pianist and conductor. Schiff was born in Budapest into a Jewish family, the only child of two Holocaust survivors. He has received numerous major awards and honours, including the Grammy Award, Gramophone Award, Mozart Medal, and Royal Academy of Music Bach Prize, and was created a Knight Bachelor in the 2014 Queen's Birthday Honours for services to music. He is also known for his public criticism of political movements in Hungary and Austria.
Maurizio Pollini is an Italian pianist. He is known for performances of compositions by Chopin and Debussy as well as works by contemporary composers.
His father was the architect Gino Pollini, one of the leading representatives of Italian rationalism and also an expert violinist. His mother, Renata Melotti, studied piano and singing and was the sister of the well-known sculptor Fausto Melotti, who had a lasting influence on the young Pollini.
Yuja Wang is a Chinese classical pianist known for wearing short skirts and backless dresses when performing. She has said: “For me, playing music is about transporting to another way of life, another way of being. An actress does that.” Yuja Wang lives in New York City.
Stephen Hough is a British-born classical pianist, composer and writer. He became an Australian citizen in 2005 and thus has dual nationality. Named by The Economist as one of Twenty Living Polymaths, Hough was the first classical performer to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (2001) and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the New Year’s Honours 2014.
Helene Grimaud is a French classical pianist and the founder of the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, New York. Grimaud doesn't sound like most pianists: she is a rubato artist, a reinventor of phrasings, a taker of chances. "A wrong note that is played out of élan, you hear it differently than one that is played out of fear," she says. She admires the "more extreme players . . . people who wouldn't be afraid to play their conception to the end."
Daniil Trifonov is a Russian pianist and composer. Described by The Globe and Mail as "arguably today's leading classical virtuoso" and by The Times as "without question the most astounding pianist of our age". Trifonov was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Soviet Union on 5 March 1991, the only child of a composer father and a music teacher mother. He began studying the piano at the age of five, and gave his first solo concert at seven. When Trifonov was eight years old, he gave his first performance with an orchestra in a Mozart concerto, losing one of his baby teeth during the performance.
Mikhail Pletnev is a Russian concert pianist, conductor, and composer. Pletnev was born into a musical family in Arkhangelsk, then part of the Soviet Union. His father played and taught the bayan, and his mother was a pianist. Pletnev has acknowledged Sergei Rachmaninoff as a particularly notable influence on him as a musician.
Emmanuel Ax is a Grammy-winning American classical pianist. He is a teacher on the faculty of the Juilliard School. Ax was born to a Polish-Jewish family in Lviv, Ukraine, (in what was then the Soviet Union) to Joachim and Hellen Ax. Both parents were Nazi concentration camp survivors. Ax began to study piano at the age of six; his father was his first piano teacher. Ax has been the main duo recital partner of cellist Yo-Yo Ma since August 3, 1973.
Angela Hewitt is a Canadian classical pianist. She is best known for her cycle of Bach recordings which she began in 1994 and finished in 2005—covering all of the major keyboard works of J.S. Bach.
JAZZ PIANISTS:
Chick Corea is an American jazz and fusion pianist, keyboardist, and composer. Growing up surrounded by jazz music, he was influenced at an early age by bebop. At eight Corea also took up drums, which would later influence his use of the piano as a percussion instrument.
George Winston is an American pianist born in Michigan. Winston dresses unassumingly for his shows, playing in stocking feet, stating that it quiets his "hard beat pounding" left foot. For years, the balding, bearded Winston would walk out on stage in a flannel shirt and jeans, and the audience would think he was a technician, coming to tune the 9-foot Steinways that are his piano of choice
Brad Mehldau is an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger. His father, Craig Mehldau, was an ophthalmologist and his mother, Annette, was a homemaker. Meldau has said, "I love the part of the Orpheus myth where he is allowed to take his wife out of Hades on the condition that he doesn't look back at her for the trip on the river Styx. When he can't help himself, he looks back, and she is pulled back downstream away from him, taken away forever. Music is that moment right when he looks at her: seeing something that you love for an instant being taken away forever. There's an element of folly to the whole thing – you look even though you know you shouldn't. Music kind of yokes together the feeling of attainment and the feeling of loss at the same time."
Herbie Hancock is an American pianist, keyboardist, bandleader, composer and actor. Like many jazz pianists, Hancock started with a classical music education. He studied from age seven, and his talent was recognized early. Considered a child prodigy, he played the first movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 26 in D Major, K. 537 (Coronation) at a young people's concert on February 5, 1952, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (led by CSO assistant conductor George Schick) at the age of 11.
Jon Batiste is an American musician, bandleader, and television personality. He has recorded and performed with artists in various genres of music (Stevie Wonder, Prince, Willie Nelson, Lenny Kravitz, Ed Sheeran, and Mavis Staples), released his own recordings, and performed in more than 40 countries. Batiste regularly tours with his band Stay Human, and appears with them nightly as bandleader and musical director on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Batiste also serves as the Music Director of The Atlantic and the Creative Director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem.
Keith Jarrett is an American jazz and classical music pianist and composer. Jarrett started his career with Art Blakey, moving on to play with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. Since the early 1970s he has enjoyed a great deal of success as a group leader and a solo performer in jazz, jazz fusion, and classical music. His improvisations draw from the traditions of jazz and other genres, especially Western classical music, gospel, blues, and ethnic folk music.
Chick Corea is an American jazz pianist/electric keyboardist and composer. His compositions "Spain", "500 Miles High", "La Fiesta" and "Windows", are considered jazz standards. As a member of Miles Davis's band in the late 1960s, he participated in the birth of jazz fusion. In the 1970s he formed the fusion band Return to Forever.
McCoy Tyner is a jazz pianist from Philadelphia known for his work with the John Coltrane Quartet and a long solo career.
Ahmad Jamal is an American jazz pianist, composer, bandleader, and educator. For five decades, he has been one of the most successful small-group leaders in jazz.
Ramsey Lewis is an American jazz composer, pianist and radio personality. Ramsey Lewis was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Ramsey Lewis Sr. and Pauline Lewis. He began taking piano lessons at the age of four. Lewis has recorded over 80 albums and has received five gold records and three Grammy Awards.
I still like books though and books are a cheaper way to go for music if you like the composer and will purchase more than one piece. For instance, I paid about $7.00 (with tax) for my digital download of Summertime by Gershwin at Musicnotes. I could have purchased Gershwin's Complete works for Solo Piano edited by Maurice Hinson for around $20.00 on Amazon. (Although, supporting your local music store is a much better idea than ordering on Amazon.) Unfortunately for me, Summertime isn't actually one of Gershwin's piano works (it comes from the Porgy and Bess Opera), so I needed a piano arrangement. In this case, Musicnotes was handy because I was able to find a wonderful Phillip Keveren arrangement there.
