One of music’s natural poets, Murray Perahia is known for the beautifully proportioned refinement of his piano playing, combining expressive warmth with intellectual rigour. He was born in New York City in 1947 to Sephardic Jewish parents. Early piano lessons led to a blossoming of his love of music from the age of 15, and his unique artistry won widespread recognition when he won the Leeds International Piano Competition in 1972. An international career and recordings soon followed. Among the most important of his early recordings is a cycle of the complete Mozart piano concertos (rec. 1976-84) with Perahia directing the English Chamber Orchestra from the keyboard, where his exquisite shaping of the more intimate works is especially rewarding. Sensing that the classical orientation of his playing would benefit from greater rhetorical expansiveness, he worked with Vladimir Horowitz in the final years of Horowitz’s life, which led to a 1991 album of Franck and Liszt. By this stage, Perahia was suffering from the effects of a thumb injury that would intermittently blight his career. He turned to Bach, with many wonderful recordings including the Goldberg Variations in 2000, while his ongoing love of Chopin is best illustrated by his outstanding accounts of the Ballades and Études (rec. 1994, 2002). Few artists are able to renew our experience of great music so vibrantly, while seeming to impose themselves on it so lightly.