Her students included Barry Douglas, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, Martha Argerich, Evelyne Brancart, Radu Lupu, Dame Mitsuko Uchida, Myung-Whun Chung, Leon Fleisher, Rafael Orozco, Christopher Elton, Hilary Coates, Simone Dinnerstein, Massimiliano Mainolfi, Matthew Schellhorn and Geoffrey Tozer.
Maria Curcio was born in Naples in 1918, to an Italian father and a Jewish-Brazilian mother, also a pianist who had studied with a pupil of Ferruccio Busoni.
Her mother arranged for her to study with Alfredo Casella and Carlo Zecchi (a pupil of Artur Schnabel)[2] in Italy, and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.
[4] She made her London debut in 1939,[3] but at the outbreak of World War II, she was in Amsterdam, where she had followed Schnabel's secretary Peter Diamand, and where she performed frequently.
However, during the German occupation of the Netherlands from 1940, when Jews were banned from playing in public, she turned down all offers of engagements in protest (Diamand was Jewish).
[1] She did, however, finally return to playing; she collaborated with such artists as Benjamin Britten, Carlo Maria Giulini, Szymon Goldberg, Otto Klemperer, Josef Krips, Pierre Monteux and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.
[1] She played privately with Sir Clifford Curzon, who had introduced her to Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and their circle in 1947.