Clara Haskil & Mozart

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from July 24, 2015. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast206

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This week’s throwback montage is from the Summer of 2015, when we featured modern and vintage performances of Mozart’s piano concertos. Many of these montages have ben featured this week on our daily podcasts.

In a 2013 interview, Pope Francis mentioned Romanian pianist Clara Haskil as one of his favorite musicians She was renowned as an interpreter of the classical and early romantic repertoire. She was particularly noted for her performances and recordings of Mozart, as well as Beethoven, Schumann, and Scarlatti.

Haskil studied in Amsterdam under Richard Robert (whose pupils also included Rudolf Serkin and George Szell) and briefly with Ferruccio Busoni. She later moved to France, where she studied with Gabriel Fauré's pupil Joseph Morpain, whom she always credited as one of her greatest influences. The same year she entered the Conservatoire de Paris, officially to study with Alfred Cortot although most of her instruction came from Lazare Lévy and Mme Giraud-Latarse, and graduated at age 15 with a Premier Prix in piano, violin and cello!

Her great talent was hampered by poor health and extreme stage fright, keeping her from critical or financial success. Most of her life was spent in abject poverty. It was only after World War II, during a series of concerts in the Netherlands in 1949, that she began to win acclaim. In 1951 she moved to Vevey in Switzerland. On top of her game, sShe died tragically 60 years ago from a fall in a Belgian train station at age 65.

An esteemed friend of Haskil, Charlie Chaplin, described her talent by saying "In my lifetime I have met three geniuses; Professor Einstein, Winston Churchill, and Clara Haskil I am not a trained musician but I can only say that her touch was exquisite, her expression wonderful, and her technique extraordinary."

Featured on the montage is one of her most famous recordings as a soloist with orchestra. Her recording of Mozart's Piano Concertos No. 20 in D minor, K. 466 and No. 24 in C minor, K. 491, made in November 1960 (one month before her death) with the Orchestre Lamoureux conducted by Igor Markevitch is highly lyrical and yet, in some way, vigorous.

As our bonus track this week, here is Clara Haskil in a recital featuring aming others the piano music of Schumann, Debussy and Ravel.

I think you will (still) live this music too.