Martha Argerich

Martha Argerich is one of the most significant virtuosos of our time. The pianist, who celebrated her 85th birthday on 5 June 2026, has been performing on the world’s great stages for eight decades. She was born in Buenos Aires and gave concerts from an early age as a child prodigy. She moved to Europe in 1955 to continue her studies in London, Vienna and Switzerland under Friedrich Gulda, Nikita Magaloff, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli and Stefan Askenase. Her international breakthrough came when she won the Concours de Genève and the Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition in 1957, followed by the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1965.

She is particularly highly regarded for her interpretations of the virtuoso piano literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her broad repertory includes works by Bach, Bartók, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Debussy, Franck, Liszt, Messiaen, Prokofiev, Ravel, Shostakovich, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky. She is a regular guest with the most prestigious orchestras and festivals in Europe, Japan and the USA, and appeared in Israel under conductors such as Zubin Mehta and Lahav Shani.

Chamber music has increasingly moved to the foreground for Martha Argerich: ‘being part of an ensemble is very soothing for me’. Her regular chamber music partners have included Daniel Barenboim, Nelson Freire, Ivry Gitlis, Gidon Kremer and Mischa Maisky, with whom she has also made many recordings.

In the 2025/26 season she was an artist in focus at the Vienna Musikverein and gave a series of concerts with long-term musical collaborators. She also made festival appearances with Magdalena Kožená, Alexandre Kantorow and Mischa Maisky at Verbier, and with the Munich Philharmonic and Lahav Shani at Grafenegg, and now returns to Salzburg with Renaud Capuçon.

Martha Argerich has inspired the founding of several festivals. In 1998 she became artistic director of the Beppu Festival in Japan. She created the Martha Argerich International Piano Competition and the Martha Argerich Festival in Buenos Aires in 1999, and from 2002 to 2016 she directed the chamber music festival Progetto Martha Argerich in Lugano. Since 2018 she and the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra have organized the yearly Martha Argerich Festival in the Laeiszhalle. These festivals in Japan, Argentina and Hamburg remain mainstays of her artistic work to this day.

Many of her concerts have been broadcast on television around the world. Her recordings for EMI, Sony, Philips, Teldec and Deutsche Grammophon have won numerous awards, including a Grammy, Gramophone magazine’s artist of the year and best concerto recording awards, the Choc du Monde de la Musique and artist of the year in the German Record Critics’ Awards. She received the OPUS Klassik in 2018 for the album Prokofiev for Two with Sergei Babayan. In 2018 her recordings on the Deutsche Grammophon label were published in a complete edition. In the same year, Warner Classics released the live recordings of Martha Argerich’s concerts in Lugano in one collection.

In 2004 Martha Argerich was named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. She is also an honorary member of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome. In 2005 she has received the Order of the Rising Sun, awarded by the Emperor of Japan, and the prestigious Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association. In 2016 Barack Obama awarded Martha Argerich the Kennedy Center Honor. In 2018 she was honoured with the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.