Piano enthusiasts may have been caught off guard when a double album containing Liszt’s Totentanz plus the Schumann and Grieg concertos and Tchaikovsky’s First appeared almost out of nowhere in 1969. The soloist, Nelson Freire, wasn’t exactly a household name, at least to American audiences. If Columbia Masterworks’ special two-for-one price tag couldn’t grab one’s attention, an accompanying press blurb by Stereo Review’s James Goodfriend claiming Freire to be ‘a cockeyed sensation’ fuelled the mystery.

However, the only ‘cockeyed’ characteristic about this exciting young Brazilian pianist was his reluctance to play the career game. ‘There is a big difference between music and the music business,’ Freire told a Baltimore Sun reporter in 1992. ‘It’s a completely different language, and when I get too involved in talking it, I get a little bit sick. As for talking about myself, it actually bores me.’ It was left to fellow professionals to speak up about a colleague almost universally hailed as a pianists’ pianist.

‘[Freire] is a terribly satisfying pianist in every possible way,’ said Ivan Davis. ‘He was born to play the piano, and he’s a combination of the Rubinstein philosophy, in that his playing is so natural, and of the Horowitz imagination, in that he’s so electrifying. As long as I live, I’ll never be able to understand why he’s not more famous.’ During the interval at Freire’s 1975 University of Maryland piano festival concert, Irwin Freundlich, an eminent and not easily impressed Juilliard professor who taught generations of distinguished pianists and heard everybody, simply called him ‘one of the greats’.

Born on October 18, 1944, in the small town of Boa Esperança, Minas Gerais, Freire began to play by ear at the age of three on his mother’s upright piano before learning to read music. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro to further his studies. In 1957, at the age of 12, Freire entered the city’s first international piano competition, playing works of Chopin and Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto in front of a jury including Lili Kraus, Marguerite Long and his compatriot Guiomar Novaes, who would become a mentor. This led to his first commercial recording in the same year, in which the sheer musicality and breadth of Freire’s Chopin Fourth Ballade and First Scherzo belie his age. Brazil’s president Juscelino Kubitschek offered Freire a scholarship to study wherever he wanted. He chose Vienna, where he went at the age of 14 to work with Bruno Seidlhofer for two years and met another teenage piano prodigy, Martha Argerich, who would become his ideal duo partner and best friend for life.

Freire’s abilities bordered on the supernatural. For example, he learnt about the 1964 Vianna da Motta International Music Competition, Lisbon, at the 11th hour, and entered two days before it started. Carlos Seixas’s Keyboard Sonata in G minor was a required work for the preliminary rounds. ‘When I got there,’ Freire recalled, ‘I asked for the score of this sonata, and they gave it to me but thought I was mad. What’s more, when lots were drawn for the order of performance, I had to play first.’ Yet Freire sailed through the piece without mishap and ultimately shared first prize with Vladimir Kraniev. This led to many engagements and opportunities, including replacing Alexander Brailowsky for a 1965 Mexican tour, and learning Tchaikovsky’s Second Concerto in a fortnight to cover for an indisposed Shura Cherkassky in Germany.

In 1967 Freire began an association with the CBS label, resulting in a passionate, red-blooded reading of Brahms’s Piano Sonata No 3, which was reissued in 1999 as part of Philips’s Great Pianists of the 20th Century series. Having studied Chopin’s Op 28 Preludes with Novaes, Freire made a Columbia recording in 1970 which unsurprisingly evokes his mentor’s ideas about phrasing and pedalling without direct imitation. Three LPs on Telefunken appeared in the 1970s: two Chopin discs, and a highly regarded Villa‑Lobos recital that includes Freire’s stunning interpretation of the composer’s electrifyingly virtuosic Rudepoêma. ‘Half a century on, Nelson Freire’s Rudepoêma still takes some beating,’ wrote Richard Whitehouse in his survey of the recorded history of this work in International Piano (July/August 2023). ‘The sheer energy and attack evident here holds attention from the outset. Nor is this visceral expression lacking in formal balance, as witnessed by a clarity of motivic evolution over the explosive central stages or that poised anticipation before the coda is unleashed.’

It’s a pity that Freire recorded relatively little during what were arguably his peak performing years in the 1980s and 1990s. Still, we do have his extraordinary collaborations with Argerich in Rachmaninov’s Second Suite, Lutosławski’s Paganini Variations and Ravel’s La valse, along with the most scintillatingly characterised performance on record of Bartók’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion.

When Freire signed with Decca in 2001, he embarked on what would be his most prolific and artistically fruitful recording partnership, lasting until the end of his career. ‘Nelson was the consummate recording artist,’ said Dominic Fyfe, Decca’s label director and the producer for Freire’s sessions, in a tribute to him on his death. ‘He was more meticulously prepared for the studio than almost any artist I have encountered and his recordings among the least edited. Paradoxically he claimed never to listen to his own recordings but he knew when his performance matched his exacting standards and he placed his trust in our hands to capture this.’

Indeed, Freire’s Decca catalogue embodies a lasting and treasure-laden legacy. His remake of Schumann’s Carnaval markedly improves on the 1967 CBS version in regard to textual diversity and vividness of character. A Liszt recital features a B minor Ballade full of mesmerising narrative sweep and revelatory inner voices, qualities that may seem alien to the Beethoven Op 111 Sonata’s metaphysical subtext, yet which also serve that overfamiliar work afresh. His Chopin Nocturnes cycle is a masterclass in how to project and float melodies to suggest that a piano has lungs instead of hammers. His Brahms collaborations with Riccardo Chailly (2005-06) was voted Recording of the Year in the 2007 Gramophone Awards. ‘This is the Brahms piano concerto set we’ve been waiting for,’ I wrote in my review (9/06). ‘Nelson Freire and Riccardo Chailly offer interpretations that triumphantly fuse immediacy and insight, power and lyricism, and incandescent virtuosity that leaves few details unturned, yet always with the big picture in clear sight.’ One also should mention ‘Radio Days’ (Decca, 11/14), a collection of archival concerto broadcasts from 1968 to 1979, hand-picked by the pianist.

In 1995, when asked if there is a typical style of Brazilian piano-playing, Freire said, ‘After soccer the piano is the second great love of Brazilians. But while Brazilian pianists have mostly worked in Europe and have certainly been deeply influenced by Europe, it is generally accepted that they have a certain rhythm, a kind of vibration that you don’t find elsewhere.’

Essential recording

Villa-Lobos Rudepoêma

Nelson Freire pf (Teldec)

Freire set empyrean standards in Villa-Lobos’s most challenging solo piano work, setting a high interpretative bar for generations of pianists. Even under studio conditions, his playing is alive and spontaneous, yet he is in full control of the exotic textures, multilayered figurations and richly complex harmonic landscape.

Defining moments

• 1957 – Recognition aged 12

Having had lessons with Lucia Branco (a student of Liszt pupil Arthur de Greef) and Nise Obino, wins prize at Rio de Janeiro competition, leading to first recording and scholarship

• 1964 – First prize aged 19

Victory at the Vianna da Motta International Music Competition, Lisbon, followed by LP recording for the Brazilian label Classic Riosom which can be heard on YouTube

• 1967 – Big-label associations begin

Starts recording for CBS

• 1970 – American debuts in New York

Rachmaninov Concerto No 4, New York Philharmonic, January 1. Goes on to play it five times in six days after the orchestra’s next scheduled soloist, Jeanne-Marie Darré, cancels owing to illness. After one substitute performance, rushes by limousine to Garden City, Long Island, for US recital debut

• 2001 – A recording rebirth

Signs with Decca, his first exclusive recording contract in more than 20 years. Remains with the label until end of career, a partnership that included winning Gramophone’s Recording of the Year in 2007 for his account of Brahms’s piano concertos

• 2009 – Salzburg encounter

Teams up with Martha Argerich for memorable festival piano duo recital (Brahms, Rachmaninov, Ravel, Schubert), recorded and released by Deutsche Grammophon

• 2019 - Éminence grise

Serves on Moscow International Tchaikovsky Competition jury; final Decca recording sessions; suffers fall and undergoes major surgery on upper right arm which leaves him unable to play

• 2021 – Death of an icon

Tentative comeback performances having been cancelled owing to pandemic, dies at home in Rio de Janeiro, November 1