Alicia de Larrocha

Alicia de Larrocha y de la Calle (23 May 192325 September 2009) was a Spanish pianist and composer. She was considered one of the great piano legends of the 20th century. Reuters called her "the greatest Spanish pianist in history", Time "one of the world's most outstanding pianists",

She won four Grammy Awards, out of fourteen nominations, and a Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts. She is credited with bringing greater popularity to the compositions of Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados. Both her parents were pianists and she was the niece of pianists. In 1969, de Larrocha performed in Boston for the Peabody Mason Concert series.

De Larrocha, writes Jed Distler, "started composing at age seven and continued on and off until her 30th year, with a prolific spurt in her late teens," and while she never performed her works in public, she gave her family the choice of making them available after her death, which they have done.

De Larrocha made numerous recordings of the solo piano repertoire and in particular the works of composers of her native Spain. She is best known for her recordings of the music of Manuel de Falla, Enrique Granados, Federico Mompou, and Isaac Albéniz, as well as her 1967 recordings of Antonio Soler's keyboard sonatas. She recorded for Hispavox, CBS/Columbia/Epic, BMG/RCA and London/Decca, winning her first Grammy Award in 1975 and her last one in 1992, at the age of almost seventy. She received the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 1994.

Less than five feet tall and with small hands for a pianist, spanning an interval of barely a tenth on the keyboard, in her younger years she was nonetheless able to tackle all the big concertos (all five by Beethoven, Liszt's No. 1, Brahms's No. 2, Rachmaninoff's Nos. 2 and 3, both of Ravel's, and those of Prokofiev, Bartók, Bliss and Khachaturian, and many more), as well as the wide spans demanded by the music of Granados, Albéniz, and de Falla. She had a "long fifth finger" and a "wide stretch between thumb and index finger" which enhanced her technical ability. and was considered a great interpreter of Chopin.

As she grew older she began to play a different style of music; more Mozart and Beethoven were featured in her recitals and she became a regular guest at the "Mostly Mozart Festival" of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York. In 2001, she was named Honorary Member of the Foundation for Iberian Music at The City University of New York. De Larrocha retired from public performance in October 2003, aged 80, following a 76-year career.

She has performed with several major orchestras and conductors, including Kurt Masur, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti, Charles Dutoit, Colin Davis, Rafael Kubelik, André Previn, Georg Solti, Seiji Ozawa, Bernard Haitink, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Eugen Jochum, Claudio Abbado and Simon Rattle.

Alicia de Larrocha died on 25 September 2009 in Quiron Hospital, Barcelona, aged 86. She had been in declining health since breaking her hip five years previously. Her husband, the pianist Juan Torra, with whom she had two children, had died in 1982.

List of awards and nominations De Larrocha won several individual awards throughout her lifetime. Her extended discography has been recognized with fourteen Grammy nominations (1967, 1971, 1974, 1975 (x2), 1977 (x2), 1982 (x2), 1984, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1992), of which she won four. She received honorary degrees from the University of Michigan, Middlebury College, and Carnegie Mellon.

A crater on the planet Mercury has been named in her honor.