Brigitte Engerer - Telegraph Of Maltese descent, Brigitte Engerer was born in Tunis on October 27 1952. She was playing the piano at the age of three and gave her first public performance at the age of six. Three years later she performed at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, in Paris, and was taken under the wing of Lucette Descaves at the Conservatoire there, winning the premier prix and picking up a prize at the Marguerite Long Competition. She moved to Moscow in 1969, becoming a student at the Conservatoire of Stanislav Neuhaus, whom she credited with opening her eyes and ears to where visual art, poetry, history and music combined. "Life was hard," she recalled in 1992. But once I got to Moscow, I could not leave, I fell in love with the land. Neuhaus in turn declared her to be "one of the most brilliant and most original pianists of her generation." In fact, her one year scholarship turned into nine. Along the way she collected prizes in the Tchaikovsky Competition and the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Belgium . However her absence came at a price. When she returned to Paris, Brigitte Engerer was largely unknown to Western audiences. Fortunately, in 1980 von Karajan heard a recording that she had made of Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy and offered her an audition. "I played for him in Belgium," she remembered. "After I finished he simply mumbled 'Sehr gut," got up and left." Moments later von Karajan's assistant entered the room with an offer for her to play with the Berlin Philharmonic. From there flowed a series of important engagements, including with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic and the Orchestre de Paris under Barenboim. The range of her repertoire was quite remarkable. As well as the Russian war-horses she was comfortable with music ranging from Beethoven's Emperor and the Saints-Saëns concertos to intimate works by Henri Dutilleux. So rare were her British appearances that London-based critics would travel to Europe to hear her, with one noting of her performance of Chopin Nocturnes in Spain two years ago that "each drama was on a grand scale, with each note weighted and balanced with fastidious authority." Although she played many important concert venues, including Carnegie Hall, New York, Brigitte Engerer always yearned for the intimacy of home, family life and chamber music. Ten days before her death from cancer Brigitte Engerer returned to the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris to reprise the Schumann Piano Concerto that she had performed there 50 years earlier. Her second husband was the author Yann Queffélec. A daughter and a son survive her. Brigitte Engerer, born October 27 1952, died June 23 2012