Maria Tipo, Italian Pianist Who Beguiled Critics, Dies at 93

New York Times

28-02-2025

Maria Tipo, a connoisseur's pianist whose flawless technique and songlike sonorities earned her the admiration of fellow musicians and critics, though she was less well known to the public, died on Feb. 10 at her home in Florence, Italy. She was 93.
Her death was announced by the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole, where she taught for more than 20 years before her retirement in 2009.
Ms. Tipo's career began in spectacular fashion, with triumphs in several major European competitions, a strong endorsement from the piano titan Arthur Rubinstein, and exhausting tours of the United States throughout the 1950s. But then she largely faded from public view, apart from occasionally releasing recordings, which usually drew high praise from music critics and a brief return to touring in the 1990s.
From the 1960s on, she devoted herself mostly to teaching. She once explained to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that the loneliness of concert life had worn her down: 'There is the concert, yes, but it only lasts a couple of hours, and then you are alone with yourself again.'
Her fellow star pianists cherished her. Martha Argerich considered Ms. Tipo one of the greats and sent her Argentine compatriot Nelson Goerner for lessons. Hundreds of students passed through Ms. Tipo's courses at conservatories in Bolzano, Florence, Geneva and Fiesole, and she created what critics described as an Italian school of piano playing. Teaching, she told the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera in 2016, was 'like a duty, to stay close to the young as they develop.'
Ms. Tipo inherited her style from one of Italy's greatest 19th- and early-20th-century masters, Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924); her mother had been Busoni's student, and when Ms. Tipo was a child growing up in Naples, her mother was her first teacher. From Busoni's influence on her mother, Ms. Tipo developed an emphatic, highly characterized manner, with strong contrasts of light and shadow.
'For him there was no limit to the piano, no limit to the possibilities of sonority,' she said of Busoni in an interview with the critic Richard Dyer of The Boston Globe in 1991. 'This was his greatness.'
It was her greatness too, in the eyes of critics like Mr. Dyer, who wrote in 1988 that 'Tipo's particular glory is the beauty of her tone.'
An early recording of 12 Scarlatti sonatas, made when she was 25, became an object of devotion among aficionados; in 1956 Newsweek called it 'the most spectacular record of the year.' The New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg wrote in 1991 that 'American record collectors went wild' over the recording.
Her bright, sharply articulated Scarlatti playing — on the piano, and not on the harpsichord or fortepiano, for which the sonatas were written — became a trademark. 'It is legitimate to play Scarlatti on the piano,' she insisted to the Italian state broadcaster RAI in 1977, before launching into a performance of total control and precision. Mr. Schonberg praised the 'bracing rhythmic vitality' of her Scarlatti, 'clear, with détaché fingering and yet a mellow legato when a long line was needed.'
She created a renaissance for the neglected piano sonatas of the early-19th-century Anglo-Italian virtuoso Muzio Clementi, recording a complete cycle for the first time to critical acclaim. 'I found a sort of Italianness in the music of Clementi,' she told Oreste Bossini of RAI in a 2015 broadcast. 'It is close to my nature. I'm a Neapolitan, full of high spirits, willful.'
She was also known for her recording of Busoni's piano transcriptions of Bach organ works, as well as for her interpretations of Schumann and Chopin. 'One forgot she was playing a piece one knows, that one has heard other people play; one forgot, even, that she was playing the piano,' Mr. Dyer wrote about a 1993 performance of Schumann's 'Davidsbündlertänze.' 'She didn't 'evoke' different states of emotion; she realized them completely.'
A 2004 review of her recording of Chopin's nocturnes in the British magazine Gramophone praised her 'consuming sensitivity to the precise weight and color of each note.'
Maria Luisa Tipo was born in Naples on Dec. 23, 1931. Her mother, Ersilia Cavallo, was a concert pianist; her father, she told The Baltimore Sun in 1993, was a mathematics professor who loved music.
When she was a teenager, at the end of World War II, her mother brought her to Rome to study with the great Italian modernist composer Alfredo Casella (1883-1947), who was already ailing. 'I saw him between operations,' she told La Repubblica. 'He was very sweet. And he praised my legato so much.'
Her big break came in 1949, when, at age 17, she won first prize at the Geneva International Music Competition. Three years later, she placed third at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, attracting the attention of Rubinstein, who was a juror. She made her New York debut in 1955 at Town Hall, drawing praise from Mr. Schonberg, who wrote that she 'carried the audience with the verve of her playing and her natural affinity to the keyboard.'
She would go on to play with the world's leading orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony. She retired from the concert stage in 1995, explaining to Il Corriere: 'I've never liked playing for myself. I've always done it only for the listeners.'
Ms. Tipo is survived by her daughter, the violinist Alina Company. Ms. Tipo's marriages to the guitarist and composer Alvaro Company and the pianist Alessandro Specchi ended in divorce.
Mr. Schonberg, writing in 1991, drew a picture of Ms. Tipo that is amply projected in her extensive legacy of recordings:
'Those who have had anything to do with Miss Tipo know how decisive she is. She is tall, imposing, genial, prone to laughter, but she can also be stubborn. When she makes up her mind, her chin juts forward, steel comes into her eyes, and she is immovable.'