Arthur Moreira Lima

Arthur Moreira Lima (16 July 1940 – 30 October 2024) was a Brazilian concert pianist and one of the country's leading pianists of his generation. Chopin stood at the center of his playing, but Brazilian music was just as present in his concerts and recordings, especially the work of Ernesto Nazareth.

Moreira Lima won second prize at the VII International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1965, behind Martha Argerich. He later took third prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 1969 and shared third prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1970. He performed across Europe, the Soviet Union and the Americas, and returned to Warsaw as a juror at the Chopin Competition in 2021.

His repertory extended from Bach, Mozart and Beethoven to Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev and Villa-Lobos. He devoted much of his career to Brazilian music, recording Nazareth, Radamés Gnattali, Francisco Mignone, Brasílio Itiberê da Cunha and Waldemar Henrique. He also played with choro musicians, singers and songwriters, bringing music that was often kept in separate concert worlds onto the same stage.

From the 1990s, Moreira Lima increasingly played outside concert halls. Through Um Piano pela Estrada, he toured Brazil with a grand piano and a truck that opened into a stage, giving free concerts in public squares, outlying neighbourhoods and small towns. By 2018, the project had given more than 500 concerts and reached an estimated audience of about one million people.

Read more about this composer on Wikipedia.