For someone who made his living by playing the piano in public, Nelson Freire was quite extraordinarily shy and self-effacing, softly spoken and reticent when it came to talking about himself or discussing his art, neither of which he particularly enjoyed. It was not without reason that John Ardoin, in his booklet accompanying Volume 29 of Philips’s Great Pianists of the Twentieth Century devoted to Freire, described him as ‘one of the best kept secrets in the world of the piano. This is not to say that he is unknown, for he has a passionate, near-cult following. But by choice he plays less concerts than most leading pianists (only 50 or 60 dates a year).’ He was also not as prolific in the recording studio as some of his peers, another reason why he tended to fall below the radar.                I got to know him a little socially after I first interviewed him back in 1979. Following a sensational concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, I manged to bag an afternoon chatting to him at the home of some mutual friends. It was then that I first witnessed his extraordinary sight-reading skills: you could turn a page at least four or five bars in advance of what he was playing; he had not only already absorbed those four or five bars that were to come but could also carry on a running commentary while looking at the new page of music. After that, there were several memorable meetings over the years: an evening with Freire, Rafael Orozco and others in my London flat, a lunch in Paris, supper in Brussels with the Tiempo family, Argerich and Freire…                                          

He was, in many ways, a throwback to the past, a virtuoso of the old school with a technique to rival Hofmann, Rachmaninov, Gieseking or any of the other ‘Golden Age’ pianists who influenced him. None more so than his compatriot Guiomar Novaes. ‘I knew and loved her since I was a kid,’ said Freire. ‘She inspired me a lot. It was not what she said – she said almost nothing – but it was the way she said it.’ Born on 18 October 1944 to a pharmacist father and schoolteacher mother, Freire was a child prodigy able at the age of three to replicate by ear the music he had heard played by his sister (fourteen years older than him). He first studied with Nise Obino, a pupil of Lucia Branco who herself had been a pupil of the great Belgian pianist Arthur de Greef, making Nelson a great-grand pupil of Franz Liszt. In 1956, aged 12, he entered the International Piano Competition in Rio de Janeiro. Though most sources claim he won this, Freire himself said he came ninth out of twelfth finalists.                                                                                                                                     After studying in Vienna, he entered the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels but did not pass the first round. It was only when he won the Vianna de Mota Competition in Lisbon (equal first prize with Vladimir Krainev) that his international career took off. By his early twenties, we find Time Magazine hailing him as ‘one of the most exciting pianists of this or any age.’                                                                                     He made his first recordings for CBS in 1968, also the year when he made the first of countless appearances with his lifelong friend Martha Argerich. Their many live performances and studio recordings together will form a rich part of Freire’s legacy. Among his other significant achievements on disc are the two Brahms Concertos with Chailly (it won a Gramophone Award in 2007), several imperishable Chopin programmes, Brasileiro (a personal selection of music by Brazilian composers) and, in 2016, a mixed Bach recital of which BBC Music Magazine wrote: ‘A pianist half his age could feel elated with the pin-sharp, dancing articulation.’ All these are for Decca, the most significant of the many labels for whom Freire recorded during his career.                                              There is a superb live performance of Schumann’s Fantaisie from 1984, Liszt’s Totentanz with both Rudolf Kempe and Michel Plasson (the latter version on Berlin Classics with two fire-breathing Liszt Concertos), and an Audiofon recital (Florida, 1984) of Mozart, Chopin, Debussy, Villa-Lobos, Albéniz, and Rachmaninov (a typical Freire programme). There is also one of the finest recordings of the Strauss-Godowsky Symphonic Metamorphosis on ‘Die Fledermaus’. In 2019 he recorded a glorious disc of encores (again for Decca) to celebrate his 75^th birthday. It was only a few weeks after this that he fell and injured his arm, forcing him to cancel all engagements. Coinciding with the pandemic and its global effect on musical life, Freire was fated to never play in public again.                                                                                                                                    

On a personal note, I shall always remember his warmth and good humour, his twinkling smile, the beautiful sound he produced when he played, his ease and astonishing brilliance at the keyboard – but perhaps, above all, his humility.