Thank you so much for your post Summerain, Maria João Pires is a wonderful human being considered a major artist, many pianists who know her well told in of the last documentaries about her that she is the only person they know that can practice a whole musical piece sitting while waiting for a bus - she can really do it, the whole one without anything, she knows it mentally. She also grown her own vegetables in her biological farm and milked cows, drive her tractor and never cared too much about her hands!

The number of musical prizes an awards tell what a good artist she is, but few people know what an extraordinary human being is in front of them when they see her perform.

She was responsible for creating an artistic school for disadvantaged children in Portugal. This project, Belgais, won the UNESCO prize for Human Rights and helped so many children but the Portuguese government gave her a huge amount of bureaucratic troubles and financial bullying that she renounced her nationality and left the country living nowadays in Brazil.




I will too find a way to see her in Luzern, a great human being, for our sorrow an expat and one great artist all in one person.