Ingrid Haebler, a pianist who drew explicit approval for her performances and recordings of the works of Mozart, impressing critics whereas nonetheless in her 20s with elegant interpretations that set her other than different musicians of her day, died on May 14. She was believed to be 96.
Decca Classics, which final 12 months launched “Ingrid Haebler: The Philips Legacy,” a boxed set of dozens of recordings she made for the Philips label, posted news of her death on Facebook. The Austrian newspaper The Salzburger Nachrichten reported her demise, attributing the data to her circle of buddies, however didn’t say the place she died.
Ms. Haebler was born in Vienna, most likely on June 20, 1926 (some news experiences stated 1929). Her father was a baron. Her mom performed piano and started educating Ingrid when she was a younger little one; she gave her first public efficiency at 11. They lived in Poland when Ingrid was younger however settled in Austria within the late Nineteen Thirties.
As a teen, she wrote poetry and dabbled in composing. But at 19 she determined to focus absolutely on piano — “I needed to kill a whole lot of my pursuits,” she advised The Sydney Morning Herald of Australia in 1964. She educated on the Salzburg Mozarteum in Austria and within the early Nineteen Fifties started incomes accolades at European piano competitions. By 1954, recordings she made for Vox with the Pro Musica Symphony of Vienna had been drawing discover within the United States.
“A fragile — however not finicky, to make the excellence — articulation of Mozart that’s unusual in the present day is the best way Ingrid Haebler performs the A significant (Ok. 414) and B-flat main (Ok. 595) Piano Concertos,” Cyrus Durgin, a music critic for The Boston Globe, wrote in August 1954, reviewing a type of information. “You will at all times discover individuals (together with musicians) defending or attacking this fashion, however it does meet Mozart’s requirement that his keyboard music ‘circulate like oil and water.’”
That identical 12 months she carried out as a soloist in England with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Mozart was her calling card, however she proved an adept interpreter of different composers as nicely, as she did in 1956 when she performed a program of Mozart, Haydn and Schubert at Wigmore Hall in London. She “captured and held spellbound her viewers,” The Daily Telegraph of Britain wrote.
By 1958, The Bristol Evening Post reported, her stature was such that, on the Bath Festival, she felt free to reject the Steinway that was offered to her in the course of the apply session and despatched the organizers scrambling to search out one other piano.
At that pageant, she additional confirmed that there was extra to her than Mozart. She performed Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and impressed The Daily Telegraph of Britain. “Without ever invoking a spurious foresight of the Beethoven that was to come back,” the newspaper wrote, “she positioned the work within the 18th century, but throughout the gulf that already separated him from Mozart.”
In October 1959 she made her American debut in Minneapolis with the Minneapolis Symphony, enjoying the Mozart Piano Concerto in B-flat.
“The acclaim of the viewers introduced the pianist again to the stage 5 times,” Ross Parmenter wrote in a review in The New York Times, “and the members of the orchestra joined within the applause.”
Ms. Haebler, who was a baroness however didn’t use the title, was nonetheless impressing audiences together with her Mozart interpretations in 1976, when, at Hunter College, she performed her first New York recital, augmenting her program with works by Schubert and Debussy however shining as common on the Mozart choices.
“This was cloudless, untroubled Mozart,” Donal Henahan wrote in a evaluate in The Times, “in keeping with the final century’s view of him as a miraculously blessed little one.”
Ms. Haebler continued to tour till early on this century. On her quite a few recordings, lots of them for Philips, she coated a spread of composers, however once more it was typically the Mozart recordings that stood out. Reviewing her recording of Mozart sonatas in 1990 for The Kingston Whig-Standard of Ontario, the critic Richard Perry zeroed in on what made her refreshingly totally different.
“In a live performance world rife with pianists of dazzling method who appeared pressured by competitors and cavernous live performance halls to display their mettle at each flip,” he wrote, “the poise and ease of Ms. Haebler’s Mozart is a uncommon deal with.”
Information on Ms. Haebler’s survivors was not instantly obtainable.
Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com