By Claude Peck

Famed pianist Alicia de Larrocha died September 25. She was 86. Here is a full-length obituary about her, from the Telegraph in London. The Spanish-born musician recorded dozens of albums and toured the world, playing music of both classical giants (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) and of lesser-known composers from her native Spain.

Alicia de Larrocha in 1978 / Photo by Ray Stubblebine

The diminutive De Larrocha played many times in the Twin Cities. Her first concert appearance with the Minnesota Orchestra was in 1971, and her final show at Orchestra Hall was in 1997, with guest conductor Jeffrey Tate. She played with the New York Philharmonic under guest conductor Osmo Vanska in 2003. De Larrocha also performed with the Schubert Club in St. Paul, and with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Did you ever hear her play? What do you remember about it?

Below is the review of De Larrocha's March,1997 concert appearance with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, by former Star Tribune music writer Michael Anthony:

We have no idea what the pianist Alicia de Larrocha sounded
like when she made her debut in 1929 at age 6 in her native
Barcelona, though there are probably any number of old Spaniards who
claim to have been there and could fill us in at great length.

It's likely that she played back then with the maturity of a
musician two or three or 10 times her age. Actual age doesn't seem
to matter in the case of this diminutive woman who will be 74 in May
and who still performs here so often. De Larrocha's recordings of music by her countrymen Granados
and Albeniz are all but definitive, but she is an eminent Mozart
player, as well, and happily, she is playing Mozart's Piano Concerto
No. 22 in E-flat, K. 482, with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra this
weekend. That De Larrocha plays Mozart with a unique elegance and sense
of proportion is hardly news. Still, there was something special
about her performance Friday night at the Ordway Music Theatre.
Maybe she has a good relationship with the evening's guest
conductor, Sergiu Commissiona. Maybe she was just in an especially
good mood, or maybe it was the piece itself. This particular concerto offers more opportunities than others
of Mozart's to add embellishments and ornaments. Had Mozart played
the piece he would, of course, have been all over the keyboard. The
scores we have of his works are merely the bare bones of what the
composer played in any given evening. Young pianists today, however,
tend to be wary of adding anything. Improvisation, even when it's
thought out in advance, isn't part of their training. They might take a lesson from De Larrocha, who added a few
discrete trills in the first movement, quite a bit more in the
middle movement, and then really took off in the finale, especially
in the brief slow section near the end. It all sounded the way it
needs to: spontaneous and well within the late 18th-century style.
In addition, the pianist's technique throughout was impeccable,
while her tone, as always, was carefully weighted and colored, and
as far as style, she remains a true classicist: The larger
structures of the piece are built up clearly from smaller units that
are never overemphasized. Like a true classicist, she even taps her
left foot in time to the music when she's not playing, but does so
discreetly. A few of Commissiona's orchestral interjections during the slow
movement of the Mozart seemed overloud. But everything else seemed
right on the mark. Taking a slightly slower pace and asking for
strong accents, the conductor easily caught the wit of Prokofiev's
Symphony No. 1, "Classical," as well as rollicking energy in the
case of the Overture to Rossini's "La scala di seta," which opened
the program. Enesco's seldom-heard "Dixtuor for Winds" received a
rich-hued account by the orchestra's wind players. MICHAEL ANTHONY