Maria João Pires announces online gym with residences in Belgals

In a statement released today, signed by “Maria João Pires and team”, it is advanced that the pianist’s new project “also offers reservations for ‘Online Explanations’ and, soon, for a new classroom format, the ‘Workshops Online’, weekly, for groups of three to four students enrolled in the academy program.

“These workshops will also be available for viewers and listeners through a subscription plan, allowing other students, teachers or music lovers to attend monthly events and participate in a monthly session of ‘online’ questions and answers, with Maria João Pires.

A plan to reopen the Belgian Arts Centre project in the Castelo Branco district is also being worked by the team, with the aim of offering “a wider variety of events and face-to-face experiences”. This time, however, sharing the activities “on an Online platform of Belgians dedicated to people from all over the world,” he explains in the statement.

This platform, “as soon as it is launched”, may host the “MJP Piano Academy”, is also read in the statement.

“ ‘Teaching’ is a common expression that everyone uses, and that is why I also use it”, says Maria João Pires, quoted by the statement. “However, it is much more than that — it is a form of dialogue through music, a ‘gift and receive’, an exchange of impressions, a shared learning in the art of listening, a search for balance. Finding out together requires mutual agreement in experience. Ultimately, it is an inner work that will certainly bring us a clearer consciousness.”.

Maria João Pires, 82 years old, announced the departure from the stage in November last year, claiming to be in a “process of radical change”, a few months after having had a health problem, which ended the tour that kept between European and Asian stages.

This announcement was made at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in Lisbon, during the delivery of the European Prize Helena Vaz da Silva for the Disclosure of Cultural Heritage, with which it was distinguished, and the artist stated that she became ill because she tried to “overtake herself and go to forbidden limits”.

“ Now I find myself in a process of radical change, in a search for truth, truths, in a path of acceptance, perhaps of understanding what I have never accepted before. It is good to think that the future is uncertain, unknown, perhaps surprising,” he said.

Last July, when she received her PhD Honoris Causa awarded by the University of Évora, Maria João Pires moved her return to active for a final concert, but admitted the possibility of returning to the studios to “make some recordings”.

Born in Lisbon on July 23, 1944, the most international and reputed of Portuguese pianists has a career dating back to the late 1940s, when she first performed in public at the age of four.

After winning the first prize of the Beethoven international competition in 1970, its name became recurrent in the programmes of the major concert halls worldwide and in the catalogues of the largest classical music publishers: Denon, first, for which she recorded the full award-winning Mozart Sonata (1974); Erato, then, in the 1980s, where she left Bach, Mozart and one of the most celebrated interpretations of Schumann's "Children Scenes"; and then Deutsche Grammophon, in 1989.

That year, he founded the Belgian Centre for the Study of Arts in Escalos de Baixo, Castelo Branco.

Throughout her career, Maria João Pires received the award from the International Council of Music of the United Nations for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO, 1970), the Pessoa Prize (1989), the Portuguese Government's Medal of Cultural Merit and the Personality of the Year/Martha de la Cal Award from the Portuguese Foreign Press Association (2019), the Imperiale Praemium (2024), the Japanese Art Association.

At the discographic level, it was distinguished four times by the Charles Cross Academy, regularly nominated for the Grammys and received a Gramophone award, highlighting its interpretations of Sonatas and the “Impromptus”, Schubert, the “Nights”, Chopin, and Mozart and Beethoven Concerts.