Rafael Orozco came from a musical family and from the age of six he studied at the Cordoba Conservatory with his father and his aunt. At thirteen he received his diploma from the Conservatory with the highest honours and left his native town for Madrid. At the Madrid Conservatory his teachers were J. Cublies, Manuel Carra and F. Cales. Orozco won the first prize for piano at the Madrid Conservatory and entered his first piano competition in Bilbao in 1963. The following year he attended the summer master-classes of Guido Agosti at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena and later that year continued his studies with Alexis Weissenberg at the same institution. During this period Orozco won prizes at other competitions including those at Jaén and Vercelli. Orozco also received tuition from Maria Curcio in London.

At the age of twenty in 1966 Orozco won first prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition, thus launching his international career in Europe and America. This was the year in which Viktoria Postnikova won second prize at the Leeds Competition, and many thought she and Orozco should have shared joint first prize. Because five instead of three finalists got through to the concerto round, they could each perform only one movement from their chosen concerto; however on the following evening, 2 October 1966, Orozco played his chosen concerto complete: Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor Op. 15, with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Charles Groves. At his London debut, in the small Purcell Room, he played Bach’s English Suite No. 3 in G minor BWV 808, Chopin’s Polonaise in F sharp minor Op. 44, Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in D minor Op. 14 and Brahms’s Piano Sonata in F minor Op. 5. Joan Chissell (perhaps writing from the Postnikova camp) found that ‘…he left no doubts whatsoever, on purely pianistic grounds, as to why he collects prizes wherever he goes. He has a phenomenal technique…As an interpreter, however, Mr Orozco has yet to learn when discretion is the better part of valour.’

Orozco was helped in his career by the enthusiasm of conductor Carlo Maria Giulini and performed with many orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic, London Symphony, Royal Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris and Cleveland Orchestra. Among the conductors he worked with are André Previn, Riccardo Muti, Lorin Maazel and Semyon Bychkov. Many international music festival appearances included those at Bath, Aldeburgh, Prague and Santander.

A virtuoso pianist who concentrated on the Romantic repertoire, playing piano concertos by Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky, Orozco also performed works by Schumann, Liszt, Chopin and Mozart. London recitals often included piano sonatas by Mozart and especially those by Beethoven such as the ‘Hammerklavier’ Op. 106, the A flat major Op. 110 and the ‘Appassionata’ Op. 57. At the end of his life (he died at the age of fifty from AIDS-related illnesses) Orozco’s style became more introverted and he programmed music by composers he had not played before, including Schubert.

Orozco’s career spanned three-fifths of his life and during the 1970s he made a fair number of recordings for Philips. His debut LP, however, was made for HMV in 1967 and consists of a recital of works by Schumann, Chopin, Albéniz and Prokofiev. Of this disc Joan Chissell wrote that it ‘…wipes out unhappy memories of an aggressive debut in the Purcell Room. Already, this young Spaniard…has matured enough to realize when discretion is the better part of valour.’ Schumann’s Toccata is expertly played with no hint of aggression whilst Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat Op. 55 No. 2 is almost cool and distanced, rather than passionate.

In 1972 Orozco recorded impressive accounts of Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor and Chopin’s Piano Sonata in B flat minor Op. 35; they are obviously performances of a young man with the emphasis more on technique than poetic insight. The following year he recorded Schumann’s Fantasie in C major Op. 17 and Kreisleriana Op. 16. Other Philips recordings include Chopin’s complete scherzos, where No. 4 in E major Op. 54 is delightfully fleet; Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor Op. 23; and the complete works for piano and orchestra by Rachmaninov, which are probably his most well known recordings. He is impressive in the rhapsodic Piano Concerto No. 1 in F sharp minor Op. 1, but one critic wrote of the recording of Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor Op. 30, ‘…taken in sum, Orozco, for all his vitality and sterling good sense, doesn’t offer us the sense of unity or the warmth of sensibility of his nearest rivals.’

In April 1981 Orozco was at Henry Wood Hall in London recording two piano concertos by Mozart with the English Chamber Orchestra and Charles Dutoit for EMI. In the ‘Coronation’ Concerto K. 537 he plays his own cadenzas, but uses Mozart’s in the B flat Concerto K. 595. Orozco’s final recordings were made for Auvidis in the early 1990s. Lionel Salter welcomed a new recording of Albéniz’s Iberia, stating that Orozco was ‘…always an outstanding technician but now with a deeper sense of interpretation and much subtlety’. Other discs for Auvidis include another recording of Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor, an encore disc, some Falla, and a coupling of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B flat D. 960 and the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy D. 760. ‘From the very first bar he conveys the mystery and visionary wonderment of the opening molto moderato’ wrote Joan Chissell, yet she found Orozco not a first choice in either work, and that could be said for many of his recordings.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — Jonathan Summers (A–Z of Pianists, Naxos 8.558107–10).