Martha Argerich is widely considered one of the greatest pianists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Unusually, her genius reveals itself mostly in collaborations: with orchestras and conductors in concertos, and with chamber musicians.

Of Catalan and Russian Jewish background, Argerich was born in Buenos Aires on June 5, 1941. She started piano lessons at five and made rapid progress, performing concertos by Mozart and Beethoven flawlessly just three years later. Her family moved to Switzerland in 1955, and she studied with Madeleine Lipatti, Nikita Magaloff, and then, for 18 months, with Friedrich Gulda in Vienna after Argentine president Juan Perón arranged for diplomatic work for her family there. Argerich won the Geneva International Competition and the Ferruccio Busoni International Competition in 1957, and she made a well-regarded debut album in 1960, featuring music by Liszt, Prokofiev, Ravel, Brahms, and Chopin. However, her real breakthrough was a first prize at the Chopin International Festival in Warsaw in 1965; she was the first pianist from the Western hemisphere to triumph, and the win brought publicity similar to that which attended Van Cliburn's International Tchaikovsky Competition victory in Moscow in 1958.

After her early years, Argerich rarely gave solo concerts, sometimes saying that she felt lonely on-stage. She recorded concertos, mostly from the late Romantic and early modern periods, with most of the major European conductors. Argerich began a long association with the Deutsche Grammophon label in the 1970s, and her 1975 release featuring concertos by Prokofiev and Ravel, with the Berlin Philharmonic under Claudio Abbado, had an iconic cover photo showing the two in intense conversation. Her 1985 recording of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor, Op. 23, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Charles Dutoit, was another classic. Dutoit was one of Argerich's three husbands; before him came composer Robert Chen, and after him pianist Stephen Kovacevich, and she had children with all three. Argerich recovered from a 1990 bout with malignant melanoma and a 1995 recurrence; she was cured by an experimental treatment at the John Wayne Cancer Institute and performed a Carnegie Hall concert to benefit the Institute. She has continued to give widely praised concerto performances into senior citizenhood, appearing at the BBC Proms in 2016 with conductor Daniel Barenboim in the Liszt Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat major. She has also been an enthusiastic performer of chamber music and duo sonatas, appearing and recording with Kovacevich, pianist Nelson Freire, violinist Gidon Kremer, and other choice players. In her later years, Argerich was widely known for her leadership of the Progetto Martha Argerich at the Lugano Festival in Switzerland, where she performed with and nurtured the careers of many young musicians. That festival came to an end in 2016 after its sponsor was investigated for possible violations of Swiss banking laws, but in 2018, she curated a new festival mounted by the Hamburg Philharmonic, and she has continued to serve as director of the Argerich Music Festival in Beppu, Japan, which she created in 1996. In 2019, she had a busy schedule of concerts across Britain, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany. Her concerts generally take up the mainstream of the concerto and chamber repertory, from Mozart to the early 20th century, but she has performed more contemporary music by her compatriot Alberto Ginastera, Witold Lutoslawski, and others.

Argerich has continued to record for Deutsche Grammophon but has also appeared on Warner, Decca, and other labels. Her recording pace has hardly slowed in her 60s and 70s; in the year 2015 alone, 11 separate Argerich recordings appeared (some were reissues of earlier material). In 2020, Argerich was heard on a new recording of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 19, with conductor Seiji Ozawa and his Mito Chamber Orchestra in Japan. By that time, her catalog included at least 175 recordings. ~ James Manheim

Frédéric Chopin was the most famous composer of Polish origin in the history of Western concert music. He was a progressive who revolutionized the harmonic content, the texture, and the emotional quality of the small piano piece, turning light dance forms, nocturnes, and study genres into profound works that were both daring and deeply inward.

Born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin to a French father and a Polish mother, probably on March 1, 1810, he was a native of Zelazowa Wola village west of Warsaw. In these rustic surroundings, he was exposed to both the classics of keyboard music (including, significantly, those of Bach), by teachers who immediately recognized him as a prodigy, and to Polish folk music, which would be reflected in a pioneering musical nationalism. He quickly outstripped the talents of most of Warsaw's top piano and composition teachers, and when he graduated from the Main School of Music in 1829, professor Józef Elsner pronounced him a genius. That year, Chopin set out on a tour of Austria, Germany, and France. During this period, he wrote his two piano concertos, which contain much of the typical brilliant style of virtuoso piano music of the era, but show the development of a gift for distinctive melody, both ornate and emotionally deep. Chopin returned to Warsaw but departed again, first for Vienna, where he heard news that Poland's uprising against its Russian, Prussian, and Austrian rulers had failed. The Polish national spirit would pervade some of his larger works, including the so-called "Revolutionary" Etude (the Etude in C minor, Op. 10, No. 12). He was encouraged by composer Robert Schumann, who reviewed his Variations, Op. 2, with the words "Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!"

In 1832, Chopin headed for Paris, in many ways the center of European cultural life, and dazzled the city's musical elite, including Franz Liszt, in a concert at the Salle Pleyel. He immediately found himself in demand as a piano teacher, and soon he decided to settle in Paris, although he always hoped to return to Poland. He performed at aristocratic salons, cultivating then-new genres such as the étude (the word means "study," but in Chopin's hands it became much more), the nocturne, the waltz, and, in a Polish vein, the mazurka and the polonaise. After a planned marriage to a Polish girl, Maria Wodzinska, fell through, Chopin met writer Aurore Dudevant, who used the pen name George Sand. The pair began a torrid affair (Sand was married) and traveled together in 1838 to Mallorca, Spain, where they found the local citizenry disapproving of their unconventional relationship and were forced to lodge in a disused monastery. Chopin's creativity was fired, and he would write brilliantly innovative sets of piano music over the next few years. However, the weather turned cold in the winter of 1838-1839, and Chopin's health worsened as he and Sand lived in the unheated building; he was probably already suffering from tuberculosis. Back in France, Chopin and Sand took up residence in Paris and in summers at her estate in Nohant, where Chopin composed prolifically and the couple hosted painter Eugène Delacroix and other members of the cream of French artistic society. The romance cooled, though, and finally ended in 1847. One factor precipitating the breakup was Sand's negative portrayal of Chopin in her 1846 novel Lucrezia Floriani.

Chopin's health was also worsening badly; he found it difficult to perform and could no longer attract crowds as a virtuoso. During political unrest in Paris in 1848, Chopin fled to the British Isles. He performed in London (once for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert) and in Glasgow, where he was the subject of romantic interest from Scots noblewoman Jane Stirling. Chopin, however, remarked that he was "closer to the grave than the nuptial bed," and indeed in November of 1848 he gave what would be his last concert, for Polish refugees. He returned to Paris and continued to receive a steady stream of admirers despite what was clearly a terminal illness; singer Pauline Viardot, according to historians Kornel Michałowski and Jim Samson, remarked that "all the grand Parisian ladies considered it de rigueur to faint in his room." Chopin died in Paris on October 17, 1849. ~ James Manheim