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2011 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance with Orchestra:

Mozart, Piano Concertos Nos. 23 and 24
Mitsuko Uchida, Cleveland Orchestra (Decca)

Pianist Dame Mitsuko Uchida has just won her first-ever Grammy award. The recording, Mozart: Piano Concertos nos. 23 & 24, was released in the US on September 8, 2009 and is one in a series of recordings of Mozart concertos with Uchida planned on Decca. The Guardian wrote about this recording: “Admirers of Uchida’s fabulously fluent Mozart playing will know what to expect from these accounts; every phrase is elegantly tooled, every texture perfectly weighted … a rapturously beautiful disc.” Mitsuko Uchida has long been one of the world’s premiere interpreters of Mozart’s piano music both in the recording studio and the concert hall. She famously recorded the Mozart Concertos with Jeffrey Tate and the English Chamber Orchestra in the 1980s.

Recently, Uchida has decided to reconsider the works and now records them live with the Cleveland Orchestra in Severence Hall with the pianist also acting as conductor. This new approach in both logistics and style has yielded results which few could have imagined. “Mitsuko Uchida’s Mozart playing here is stunningly sensitive, crystalline, and true. These two concertos have been over-recorded, but this soloist and this great orchestra prove there is still more to say.” (Boston Globe – Record Review)

The next recording in this series, Mozart: Piano Concertos nos. 20 & 27, will also feature the Cleveland Orchestra and Uchida as both conductor and soloist and will be released later this spring.

Uchida said about the award, “I feel very happy about receiving this Grammy Award, especially because it is for the first recording in a series of Mozart concerti with The Cleveland Orchestra. These are people with whom I have a long association, so it gives me particular pleasure.”

Read more:
The 2011 Grammy Award Classical Winners

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Here is an example of Uchida playing Mozart from a live concert during Salzburger Festspiele 2006:
W. A. Mozart – Piano concerto No 25 (Uchida, Vienna Philharmonic, Muti)

/patrick

“Mitsuko Uchido is one of perhaps just a handful of classical pianists whose work can justifiably be mentioned alongside the great players of the past – Rachmaninov, Schnabel, Cortot, Michelangeli.” (ABC Radio National, Australia)

This season, Uchida is artist-in-residence with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Her residency includes performances of Schumann’s Piano Concerto with Sir Simon Rattle, and a series of four chamber music concerts. She is also artist-in-residence at the Konzerthaus Vienna and at the Salzburg Mozartwoche.
Here you can enjoy an excerpt from the third movement of the mentioned Schumann a minor Piano Concerto performance as of February 13, 2009:

Excerpt third movement:

Interview with Uchida on the Schumann concerto:

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Born in Atami, a seaside town close to Tokyo, Japan, Uchida moved to Vienna, Austria when she was twelve years old with her diplomat parents after her father was named the Japanese ambassador to Austria. She enrolled at the Vienna Academy of Music to study with Richard Hauser, and later Wilhelm Kempff and Stefan Askenase, and remained in Vienna to study after her father was transferred back to Japan after five years. She gave her first Viennese recital at the age of 14 at the Vienna Musikverein.

In 1969 she won the first prize in the Beethoven Competition in Vienna and in 1970 the second prize in the International Frederick Chopin Piano Competition. Then, in 1975, she won second prize in the Leeds Piano Competition. From 2002 to 2007 she served as artist-in-residence for the Cleveland Orchestra, where she led performances of all of Mozart’s solo piano concertos.

She is an acclaimed interpreter of the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Debussy and Schoenberg. She has recorded all of Mozart’s piano sonatas (a project that won the Gramophone Award), and concerti, the latter with the English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Jeffrey Tate. She is further noted for her recordings of Beethoven’s complete piano concerti with Kurt Sanderling conducting, Beethoven’s late piano sonatas, and a Schubert piano cycle. Her recording of the Debussy Études won another Gramophone Award, and so did her recording of the Schoenberg piano concerto. In April 2008, BBC Music Magazine presented her its Instrumentalist of the Year and Disc of the Year award. She is distinguished as an interpreter of the works of the Second Viennese School (read the interview from The Guardian below).

She is an Artistic Director of the Marlboro Music School and Festival, along with fellow pianist Richard Goode. She is also a trustee of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, an organization established to help young artists develop and sustain international careers. Uchida is a recipient of the 1986 Suntory Music Award.

Interview from The Guardian, February 2006:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2006/feb/25/classicalmusicandopera.mozart

/patrick