Arthur Moreira Lima (16 July 1940 – 30 October 2024) was a Brazilian concert pianist and one of the country's leading pianists of his generation. Chopin stood at the center of his playing, but Brazilian music was just as present in his concerts and recordings, especially the work of Ernesto Nazareth.
Moreira Lima won second prize at the VII International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1965, behind Martha Argerich. He later took third prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 1969 and shared third prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1970. He performed across Europe, the Soviet Union and the Americas, and returned to Warsaw as a juror at the Chopin Competition in 2021.
His repertory extended from Bach, Mozart and Beethoven to Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev and Villa-Lobos. He devoted much of his career to Brazilian music, recording Nazareth, Radamés Gnattali, Francisco Mignone, Brasílio Itiberê da Cunha and Waldemar Henrique. He also played with choro musicians, singers and songwriters, bringing music that was often kept in separate concert worlds onto the same stage.
From the 1990s, Moreira Lima increasingly played outside concert halls. Through Um Piano pela Estrada, he toured Brazil with a grand piano and a truck that opened into a stage, giving free concerts in public squares, outlying neighbourhoods and small towns. By 2018, the project had given more than 500 concerts and reached an estimated audience of about one million people.
Biography
Early life and training
Childhood in Rio de Janeiro
Moreira Lima was born in Rio de Janeiro on 16 July 1940. His father died when he was three. He first attended the Liceu Francês and later studied at the Colégio Militar do Rio de Janeiro.
He began piano lessons at six and became a pupil of Lúcia Branco in 1948. The following year, at the age of nine, he gave his first professional recital at the Theatro da Paz in Belém.
Branco entered him in the 1949 Young Soloists competition of the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra. He won by unanimous decision after playing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 under Eleazar de Carvalho. In 1952, he won again with Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1. That victory led to an appearance at the Theatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro under the English conductor Richard Austin.
In 1956, Moreira Lima won a competition organized by Rádio Ministério da Educação. The prize was a scholarship to study in Paris, but he postponed the trip and stayed at the Colégio Militar. He reached the final of the first Rio de Janeiro International Piano Competition in 1957. Guiomar Novaes, who sat on the jury, awarded him an honorable mention. Marguerite Long invited him to study with her in France, and President Juscelino Kubitschek approved another scholarship for the trip. By seventeen, Moreira Lima had received two scholarships for study in Paris.
Paris and Moscow
Moreira Lima left for Paris in 1960 and began studying with Long. He played in events for the 150th anniversary of Chopin's birth and took part in that year's Ravel Festival. At the Académie Marguerite Long, he finished first among fifty students in the Cours de Piano Supérieur. He also received an honorable mention at the Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud Competition.
In 1962, he took third prize at the third Rio de Janeiro International Piano Competition. He was the only Brazilian in the final. The result brought an offer to study at the Juilliard School in New York. That year, he also entered the first Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Texas. He did not reach the final, but Van Cliburn encouraged him to study at the Moscow Conservatory.
The Russian pianists Yakov Zak, Lev Oborin and Sergei Dorensky supported his application. Moreira Lima received a five-year scholarship from the Soviet government and entered the conservatory in 1963.
He studied with Rudolf Kehrer until 1968. Their lessons focused on phrasing, tone and making the piano sing. When Moreira Lima worried about having to learn Russian, Kehrer told him that far more people spoke Russian than played the piano well. In 1965, Kehrer chose him as one of seven students from the Moscow Conservatory to enter the VII International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw.
International career
In 1965, while studying at the Moscow Conservatory, Moreira Lima was chosen by Rudolf Kehrer to enter the VII International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. He reached the final, played Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2, and won second prize behind Martha Argerich. He kept Chopin in his concert programs for the rest of his career.
He returned to Moscow, finished his studies, and spent three years as Kehrer's teaching assistant. On a visit to Brazil in 1966, he gave a recital at the Theatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro with music by Schumann, Chopin and Prokofiev. He closed the concert with Ernesto Nazareth's Batuque and Coração que sente.
Moreira Lima won third prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 1969, behind Radu Lupu and Georges Pludermacher. Boris Petrushansky and Anne Queffélec were among the other finalists. A year later, he shared third prize with Victoria Postnikova at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. In the final, he played Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3.
He moved to Vienna after the Tchaikovsky Competition and spent much of the 1970s touring from there. He played with the Leningrad, Moscow and Warsaw philharmonic orchestras, the Berlin, Vienna and Prague symphony orchestras, BBC orchestras in London, and the Orchestre National de France. He performed under Kurt Sanderling, Kirill Kondrashin, Mariss Jansons, Serge Baudo, Jesús López Cobos, Charles Groves, Vladimir Fedoseyev and Rudolf Barshai.
Chopin and other Romantic composers stayed in his programs, while Brazilian music took up more space in his concerts and albums. In 1975, he made a double album of music by Ernesto Nazareth for the Marcus Pereira label. He returned to Nazareth in later albums and recitals. He played music by Heitor Villa-Lobos, Brasílio Itiberê da Cunha, Radamés Gnattali, Francisco Mignone and Waldemar Henrique, as well as Chopin, Brahms, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Schumann, Prokofiev and Mussorgsky.
Near the end of the 1970s, Moreira Lima made Brazil his main base again, though he still performed abroad. He worked more often with musicians from choro and Brazilian popular music, among them Época de Ouro, Elomar Figueira Mello, Paulo Moura and Heraldo do Monte. He made Chorando Baixinho with Época de Ouro and Abel Ferreira, Parcelada Malunga with Elomar, and ConSertão with Elomar, Moura and Heraldo do Monte.
In 1981, he gave an all-Chopin recital in New York. He returned the next year with a program that paired Chopin with Brazilian music. That year, he played Nazareth at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. In a 1984 review for The Washington Post, Joseph McLellan wrote that the concert introduced Nazareth to American audiences and called Moreira Lima's playing "fluent, technically assured and totally idiomatic".
In 2021, Moreira Lima returned to the Chopin Competition as a member of the jury, fifty-six years after winning second prize there.
Television and public outreach
Television
Moreira Lima presented Um Toque de Classe on TV Manchete in 1985 and 1986. The show paired conversation with live music. A single episode could move from the concert repertory to choro, samba or Brazilian popular song. César Camargo Mariano took over as host after Moreira Lima's run ended.
Guests on the program included Radamés Gnattali, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Paulinho da Viola, Raphael Rabello, Milton Nascimento, Ney Matogrosso, Moreira da Silva, João Nogueira and Nelson Gonçalves. Moreira Lima spoke with them from the piano and often played alongside them.
Concerts beyond recital halls
In the 1990s, Moreira Lima began giving more concerts away from the usual recital circuit. He played in Mangueira, Rocinha and towns in the interior of Rio de Janeiro state. For some listeners, these performances were their first chance to hear a concert grand piano in person.
He also brought his recordings to newsstands. In 1998, Editora Caras released 41 CDs of his performances, accompanied by texts from Eric Nepomuceno. The set covered European composers and Brazilian music.
Um Piano pela Estrada
Moreira Lima developed the idea for Um Piano pela Estrada while working as Rio de Janeiro's undersecretary of culture for the interior. A concert in a new town required a piano, a stage, lighting and sound equipment. Setting everything up and taking it down could take days. He decided to carry the stage and piano from town to town.
He bought a Scania truck with his own money and had it rebuilt so that one side opened into a stage. The truck used air suspension to reduce the shocks carried to the piano while travelling. It was completed in September 2001 and began making appearances in 2002. The first full tour came in 2003 under the title São Francisco: Um Rio de Música, with concerts in twelve towns along the São Francisco River.
In 2005 and 2006, the tour Nos Caminhos da Fronteira reached 35 towns near Brazil's land borders, from Chuí in Rio Grande do Sul to Xapuri in Acre. The 2007 tour, Nos Caminhos de JK, stopped in 57 cities across Maranhão, Minas Gerais, Goiás, Tocantins and Pará, with further concerts in the Federal District and Rio de Janeiro.
By 2007, the project travelled in two trucks. They carried a Steinway grand piano, a second Steinway kept in reserve and a smaller piano for Moreira Lima to use between concerts. The main truck opened into a stage measuring about . It also carried sound and lighting equipment, a projection screen and a dressing room.
The crew could prepare the truck for a concert in about an hour. Before a performance in Santos in 2012, twelve workers opened the stage, installed the sound, lights and screen, and tuned the piano. They packed everything away in about the same time before leaving for the next stop. By 2018, seventeen people travelled with the project, including a piano tuner and a sound engineer.
The concerts were free and usually lasted about ninety minutes. Moreira Lima moved from Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart and Villa-Lobos to Pixinguinha, Ernesto Nazareth, Luiz Gonzaga and Astor Piazzolla. Local musicians sometimes opened the evening. In Aracaju in 2017, a string quartet from the Escola de Artes Valdice Teles played before his concert in Praça General Valadão.
Some tours were financed by private companies through Brazil's federal cultural incentive law. Municipal governments supplied the concert sites, seating and local crews. The 2012 tour Brasil Sertões 2, sponsored by Ultragaz, passed through fifteen cities. Its Recife stop was the project's 443rd concert. The Santos concert one month earlier was numbered 435, and the Aracaju concert in May 2017 was numbered 533.
By 2018, Um Piano pela Estrada had given more than 500 concerts and travelled about . Organizers estimated a total audience of about one million people. The trucks travelled through every region of Brazil and stopped in public squares, outlying neighbourhoods and towns where piano recitals were rare.
Recordings
Moreira Lima's recordings covered Romantic piano literature, twentieth-century repertory and Brazilian music. His discography included concertos and solo works by Chopin, Brahms, Mozart and Rachmaninoff, alongside Brazilian repertory by Nazareth, Gnattali, Villa-Lobos, Brasílio Itiberê and Mignone.
The following discography lists album-length recordings, including collaborative albums and archival releases.
Principal and collaborative albums