Anyone who saw Clara Haskil in the ’50s will recall someone who seemed to come from another world: fragile and prematurely aged, this almost spectral figure approached the keyboard with some trepidation. Clara Haskil’s life was a tale of singular suffering, the story of a career repeatedly interrupted by ill health. Born in 1895, the infant prodigy of a family of Romanian Jews, she gave her first public performances at the age of five. After her father’s early death, she went to live with her uncle, who took her to Vienna and then Paris, where the young Clara studied with Lazare Lévy and later, without any great enthusiasm, with Alfred Cortot. She often performed as both pianist and violinist, to the admiration of musicians such as Fauré, Busoni and Paderewski. Around the age of twenty she began to show signs of a serious deformation of the spinal column and later underwent a delicate operation for a brain tumour. In 1942 she fled to Switzerland to escape Nazi persecution and became a Swiss citizen. It was not until the end of the ‘40s that she began to record regularly for major labels, which is why this disc only covers her later career, by which time her health was failing. Nevertheless, throughout the 1950s Clara Haskil travelled tirelessly around Europe to growing acclaim from a public that revered her almost as a martyr. She died in 1960, not as a result of her illnesses, but from falling down the stairs in Brussels railway station. While Clara Haskil is mainly remembered for her interpretations of Mozart, marked by a purity of tone and the still unsurpassed modernity of her interpretation, her repertoire ranged from Scarlatti to Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms and even certain twentieth century composers. Her recording of eleven Sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, made in 1950, remains a reference point for the understanding of the Neapolitan composer’s work and anticipates the modern trend of entrusting the task of deciphering the complex universe of the sonatas to the pianoforte, rather than the harpsichord. Schubert’s Sonata in B flat frequently appeared in Haskil’s concert programmes in the 50s, at a time when the composer’s sonatas were rarely performed and thus not well known to the public. Haskil’s reading is again extremely modern in its attention to phrasing and singability, which results in a wonderful softness in the sound levels. Schumann is also an important part of the Romanian pianist’s expressive world: in fact, her interpretation of Kinderszenen is perhaps her most well known recording, much admired for its magnificent sense of poetry. A characteristic shared by the Piano Concerto, in which Haskil demonstrates a vision that perfectly balances virtuosity and lyricism.
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