Claudio Arrau (1903-1991) was a Chilean pianist, one of the towering keyboard artists of the twentieth century. A child prodigy, he studied in Berlin and developed an immense repertory spanning Bach to the modern era.

Arrau became especially associated with Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, Schumann and Chopin. In the Pristine catalogue he appears in Bach’s Goldberg Variations and in New York Philharmonic broadcasts with Victor de Sabata.

His playing combined intellectual depth, sonorous weight and a searching, sometimes monumental sense of musical time. He was not a pianist of glitter alone, but of gravity and inward pressure.

Arrau’s legacy is vast. His best performances feel like deep wells: dark at the surface, inexhaustible below.