Martha Argerich - Martha Argerich - The Complete Sony Recordings (2016)

Martha Argerich – The Complete Sony Classical Recordings is a 5 CD original jackets collection containing 2 CDs remastered from the original analogue tapes using 24bit/96 kHz technology.

Martha Argerich (born June 5, 1941) is an Argentine pianist, widely regarded as one of the greatest pianists of the second half of the 20th century.

Martha Argerich rose to international prominence when she won the seventh International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1965, at age 24. In that same year, she debuted in the United States in Lincoln Center's Great Performers Series. In 1960, she had made her first commercial recording, which included works by Chopin, Brahms, Ravel, Prokofiev, and Liszt.

Martha Argerich was born in Buenos Aires. She started playing the piano at age three. At the age of five, she moved to teacher Vincenzo Scaramuzza. Argerich gave her debut concert in 1949 at the age of eight. The family moved to Europe in 1955, where Argerich studied with Friedrich Gulda in Austria. She later studied also with Stefan Askenase and Maria Curcio. Argerich also seized opportunities for brief periods of coaching with Madeleine Lipatti (widow of Dinu Lipatti), Abbey Simon, and Nikita Magaloff. In 1957, at sixteen, she won both the Geneva International Music Competition and the Ferruccio Busoni International Competition, within three weeks of each other. It was at the latter that she met Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, whom she would later seek out for lessons during a personal artistic crisis at the age of twenty, though she only had four lessons with him in a year and a half. Her greatest influence remained Friedrich Gulda, with whom she studied for 18 months.

Since the 1980s, Martha Argerich has staged few solo performances, concentrating instead on concertos and, in particular, chamber music, and collaborating with instrumentalists in sonatas. She is noted especially for her recordings of 20th-century works by composers such as Rachmaninoff, Messiaen and Prokofiev. Argerich is president of the International Piano Academy Lake Como and performs each year at the Lugano Festival. She also created and has been General Director of the Argerich Music Festival and Encounter in Beppu, Japan, since 1996.