Maria Tipo, Italian pianist acclaimed for her interpretations of Bach, Scarlatti and the Romantics

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24-02-2025

Maria Tipo, who has died aged 93, was an Italian pianist revered for her brilliant articulation, immaculate precision and admirable control of the instrument; she was among the first European pianists to bring the complete Bach Goldberg Variations to the concert platform inspired, she said, by the playing of Glenn Gould.
The Goldberg Variations were at the heart of a 1969 Wigmore Hall concert in which a Daily Telegraph critic noted that her 'excellent finger technique and perfectly poised, effortless-sounding part-playing told immediately and strongly in her favour'.
While purists derided her 'Bach-maninov' approach to Baroque music, she was one of the great contrapuntalists, attracting acclaim for her interpretation of sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti and Muzio Clementi both in concert and on disc.
Yet Maria Tipo, a tall, sultry-looking blonde, did not consider herself a specialist in any particular composer. Her performance of four Chopin studies at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1970 was a 'tour de force'; her account of Beethoven's First Piano Concerto with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra was 'vivacious and sparkling'; and the impression given by her Schumann recording for EMI was, noted Gramophone, 'of an artist who takes whatever she plays very much to heart'.
Maria Tipo was born in Naples on December 23 1931; her first piano lessons were with her mother, Ersilia Cavallo, a pupil of Ferruccio Busoni, and she made her public debut at the age of 4. Her parents, however, refused to pass her off as a child prodigy and took her to study in Rome with the elderly Alfredo Casella, who gave lessons in his dressing gown, and Guido Agosti, another Busoni student.
In 1949 she won the Geneva Piano Competition. Three years later Arthur Rubinstein heard her at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Belgium, where she came third, and wrote: 'She is not only a complete pianist, but she has the most exceptional talent of our time.'
The impresario Sol Hurok launched her on a whirlwind tour of North and South America, including an exhausting 125 concerts in three months. As a result, it was 1967 before her London debut, the long-anticipated occasion moving a Daily Telegraph critic to raptures over the 'vitality and reverence… crystalline ornamentation… brilliant and compelling'.
Marriage, family and a weariness with travelling limited Maria Tipo's career. But on returning to the US in 1991 after a hiatus of 32 years she was hailed as the 'Neapolitan Horowitz', after the mercurial American pianist Vladimir Horowitz's long absences from the concert hall. She was having none of it. 'He was Horowitz. I am from Naples,' she told Harold Schonberg in The New York Times.
British audiences were less fortunate: her last appearance here appears to have been a 1973 recital in Cardiff. 'Beethoven's Piano Sonata No 3 was full of character and Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No 5 both brilliant and lyrical,' observed the critic Kenneth Loveland.
She settled in Florence, teaching at the Conservatory and later the Fiesole School of Music; her students included the Argentine pianist Nelson Goerner. By her 70th birthday, she told an Italian newspaper, she no longer felt the need to play endlessly. 'You travel, you eat, you sleep alone. There is the concert, yes, but it only lasts a couple of hours, and then you are alone with yourself again,' she said.
Maria Tipo's two marriages, to the guitarist Alvaro Company and the pianist Alessandro Specchi, were 'important slices of life', though both were dissolved. She had a daughter, the violinist Alina Company, from her first marriage.
Maria Tipo, born December 23 1931, died February 10 2025
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