Over to Cologne this weekend for a historic performance by the West German Radio Symphony, conducted by Joseph Keilbert and featuring Ingrid Haebler, piano.
They play Mozart’s Piano Concerto Number 18 K.456 – recorded October 30,1961 by WDR in Cologne.
Haebler was born in Vienna. Her parents moved to Poland shortly after her birth, where she remained for her early childhood. Many celebrated musicians were regular visitors to the Haebler home, including Claudio Arrau, Robert Casadesus and Bronislaw Huberman. It was Casadesus who recognized the child’s talent as a pianist and predicted a great future for her.
On the outbreak of World War II the family moved to Salzburg where Haebler made her first public appearance at the age of eleven. She took up studies at the Mozarteum under Professor Heinz Scholz, graduating in 1949 with distinction for her playing of Mozart, and along the way developing a taste for music of the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. That same year Haebler won the Lilli Lehmann Medal of the International Mozarteum Foundation.
Haebler studied at the Salzburg Mozarteum, Vienna Music Academy, Conservatoire de Musique de Genève and privately in Paris with Marguerite Long.
Haebler toured worldwide and is best known for a series of recordings she made from the 1950s to 1980s. Her complete set of Mozart’s piano sonatas for the Denon label is still regarded by many critics as among the finest sets.
Haebler also recorded all of Mozart’s piano concertos (most of them twice), often with her own cadenzas, and all of Schubert’s sonatas. She was one of several Austrian musicians to experiment early with period instruments, having recorded the keyboard concertos of Johann Christian Bach on a fortepiano, with the Capella Academica Wien under Eduard Melkus, as well as Mozart’s keyboard concertos nos. 1-4 with the same ensemble and director for Philips Records. Her recordings of Mozart and Beethoven with the violinist Henryk Szeryng are particularly prized by collectors.
Through the 1950s, Ingrid Haebler’s repertoire ranged from Bach to Stravinsky and she toured extensively in Europe, North Africa, Australia, the United States, Canada, and Japan. She began annual appearances at the Salzburg Festival in 1954.
Sadly, Ingrid Haebler died in 2023.
But here we are in 1961 – enjoy the performance.
