Piano Street Magazine

Mitsuko Uchida Wins Her First-Ever Grammy

February 19th, 2011 in Piano News by | 6 comments

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


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)

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Comments

  • Micah says:

    I admire Uchida

  • Ginny Blair says:

    She’s great, all you need to succeed in life is to start learning the piano while very young and love it the whole way.

  • Mary Rose C. Amistad says:

    I congratulate her and she deserves it! Sometimes… words cannot describe the beauty of playing the piano… because I believe that the true feeling of showing your talent in playing the piano is only expressed within you as a person… your heart … your soul expressing a unique kind-of playing… and she in all aspects expressed that piano playing is not only a talent in playing the keyboard… but an expression of art in the beauty of how she had the audience mesmerized by her performances in playing each and every pieces… touching every single notes with outmost precision… expressing her own interpretations throughout the concert…

  • cjrcl says:

    I have her 5 CD set of Mozart’s Piano Sonata Collection, the brilliant K331 in which I love the most!

  • Mark says:

    Absolutely brilliant!!!

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