Maria Tipo, lyrical pianist and Scarlatti interpreter, dies at 94

Boston Globe

13-02-2025

Like Clementi, Ms. Tipo was overlooked at times by the public, especially in the United States. Although she crisscrossed the country in the 1950s, playing more than 300 concerts in an era when the vast majority of her fellow pianists were men, she later stayed away for three decades, returning to Italy to teach and start a family. By the time she resumed touring in the United States in the early 1990s, New York magazine was calling her 'the world's best-kept musical secret.'
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Writing for the magazine in 1993, journalist Charles Michener described her piano playing as 'musical storytelling of the highest order,' offering special praise for her recordings of Domenico Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas. 'Here was a rhythmic vitality that swept away all cobwebs of antiquity,' he wrote, 'and gave every phrase a dancing life.'
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Ms. Tipo was highly regarded by colleagues such as Martha Argerich, one of the world's leading classical pianists, who paused during a concert in Turin, Italy, on Tuesday to dedicate a Robert Schumann piece in her honor. In remarks that were captured on social media, she called Ms. Tipo 'an extraordinary inspiration for her musicality, her flair, and her fantastic pianism,' adding that Ms. Tipo, who taught at conservatories in Italy and Switzerland, 'was also an extraordinary pedagogue.'
'Her sound was glorious,' pianist Nelson Goerner, who studied with Ms. Tipo in Geneva, said in a phone interview. 'She had the most beautiful cantabile that you can imagine a piano can produce. She was, to me, a very complete, very honest artist. She played with great flashes of imagination but with thoughtful respect for the scores.'
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Ms. Tipo was only 17 when she rose to prominence in 1949, winning the top piano prize at the Geneva International Music Competition. Three years later, she came in third place at another top music contest, the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. One of the jurors, revered pianist Arthur Rubinstein, recommended her to his manager, impresario Sol Hurok, who brought Ms. Tipo to the United States, arranging for her New York City debut at the Town Hall in 1955.
'Whatever she touched came out with confidence and competence,' New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote in a review, highlighting her 'rhythm and clarity' and 'the verve of her playing.'
At age 24, in 1956, Ms. Tipo released her debut album, a record of 12 Scarlatti sonatas she said she recorded in four hours. Released by the Vox label, the album became a favorite among critics and collectors — it was reissued on CD decades later — and brought her comparisons to pianist Vladimir Horowitz, whose earlier performances of the sonatas had helped revive interest in the Italian composer.
Three decades later, Ms. Tipo recorded the Goldberg Variations for EMI, tackling a keyboard classic that had gained fresh recognition through the playing of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Admirers, including music critic Richard Dyer of The Boston Globe, praised the emotional intensity and lyricism of her approach, although others questioned whether her grand gestures and idiosyncratic tempo changes were needed.
Ms. Tipo was always one to go her own way. Asked about the different ways she and Horowitz approached Scarlatti, she replied bluntly: 'He was Horowitz. I am from Naples.'
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'Those who have had anything to do with Miss Tipo know how decisive she is,' Schonberg, the Times critic, wrote in 1991, on the eve of the pianist's first New York solo recital in 32 years. '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. Period. Subject closed.'
The daughter of a mathematician and a pianist, Maria Luisa Tipo was born in Naples on Dec. 23, 1931. She began playing the piano as a young girl, studying under her mother, a former pupil of pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni, before training under Alfredo Casella and Guido Agosti.
'I never heard recordings. My recordings were my mother,' Ms. Tipo said of her childhood. 'She played; I listened.'
Around the time she returned to Italy in the 1960s, worn down by the isolation of her life as a touring pianist, Ms. Tipo married Alvaro Company, a guitarist and composer, and had a daughter. Their marriage fractured, ending in divorce, as Ms. Tipo sought to juggle work and family amid expectations that she look after the home.
'It was very hard to be artist, mother, and wife,' she told New York magazine. 'When I returned home from an engagement, I had to deal with everything — the house, the students, the
bambina
. The man knows nothing about that!'
Ms. Tipo's second marriage, to pianist Alessandro Specchi, also ended in divorce. She leaves her daughter, Alina Company, who became a violinist and, like Ms. Tipo, a teacher at the Fiesole School of Music.
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Ms. Tipo said she found a new form of fulfillment as a teacher, working with piano students including Fabio Bidini, Frank Lévy,
Pietro De Maria,
Giovanni Nesi, and
Andrea Lucchesini. Goerner said Ms. Tipo had an almost maternal affection for her pupils.
As Ms. Tipo saw it, there was a direct link between a person's inner life and their musical abilities. She hoped to foster both, explaining to New York magazine, 'The more rich you are inside, the better the music.'