Martha Argerich is an Argentine pianist, born in Buenos Aires on June 5, 1941. She began playing the piano at three and made her public debut at eight, performing a Mozart concerto. Her family moved to Europe in 1955, and she has lived there since; since 2003, she has been based in Brussels. She studied with Friedrich Gulda, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Stefan Askenase, and Nikita Magaloff.
Argerich won the Geneva International Music Competition and the Busoni International Piano Competition in 1957, followed by the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1965. Her awards include Grammy Awards for Best Chamber Music Performance in 2005, for recordings of Prokofiev and Ravel with Mikhail Pletnev, and for Best Instrumental Performance with Orchestra in 2006, for Beethoven with Claudio Abbado and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. She received Japan’s Praemium Imperiale in 2005, was made a Commander of the French Legion of Honour in 2023, and became a Grand Officer of Romania’s Order of Faithful Service in 2024.
Her repertoire ranges across European piano music from Bach to Bartók, with a particular focus on Romantic composers such as Chopin and Schumann. She has frequently performed with Nelson Freire, Stephen Kovacevich, Gidon Kremer, Alexander Rabinovitch, Mischa Maisky, and Daniel Barenboim. She appeared as an accompanist to Ivry Gitlis in the 2003 feature film Sansa. A documentary about her, Georges Gachot’s Martha Argerich: Night Conversation, was released in 2002, and she was inducted into Gramophone magazine’s Hall of Fame.
Her first husband was composer and conductor Robert Chen, with whom she had a daughter, violinist Lyda Chen-Argerich. She was married to conductor Charles Dutoit from 1969 to 1973, and they had a daughter. In the 1970s, she was in a relationship with pianist Stephen Kovacevich; they have a daughter, Stéphanie.