Ingrid Hebler, the acclaimed pianist who performed and recorded Mozart’s works and impressed critics with an elegant interpretation that set her apart from other musicians of her time, still in her twenties, died May 14. . He will be 96 years old.
Last year, Decca Classics released a box set called Ingrid Hebler: The Phillips Legacy, a collection of dozens of recordings she made for the Phillips label. posted the news of her death On facebook. The Austrian newspaper The Salzburger Nachrichten reported her death citing information by a friend of hers, but she did not specify where she died.
Ms. Hebler was probably born in Vienna on June 20, 1926 (some reports give 1929). Her father was a baron. Her mother played the piano and she began teaching Ingrid at an early age. She made her first public performance at the age of 11. They lived in Poland when Ingrid was young, but settled in Austria in the late 1930s.
As a teenager, she wrote poetry and also dabbled in composition. However, when she was 19, she decided to concentrate fully on the piano. She “had to kill many of her own interests,” she told Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald in 1964. She trained at the Salzburg Mozarteum in Austria and began earning her accolades in the early 1950s. She at a European piano competition. By 1954, her recordings for Vox with Vienna’s Pro Musica Symphony Orchestra were gaining attention in the United States.
“Mozart’s subtle but not finicky articulation, rare today, is the playing of Ingrid Hebler’s Piano Concertos in A major (K. 414) and B flat major (K. 595).” Silas Durgin, A Boston Globe music critic wrote in August 1954 reviewing one of those records. “I see people (including musicians) defending or attacking this practice all the time, but it fulfills the claim that Mozart’s keyboard music ‘flows like oil and water’.”
That same year she performed as a soloist with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in England. Mozart was her calling card, but she was also an accomplished interpreter for other composers, as when she performed a program of Mozart, Haydn and Schubert at London’s Wigmore Hall in 1956. Proved. Britain’s Daily Telegraph wrote that she “fascinated and kept her audience captivated”.
By 1958, the Bristol Evening Post had no hesitation in refusing a Steinway offered to her during practice at the Bath Festival, due to her height, and the organizers scrambled to find another piano. reported.
At the festival she also showed that she was more than Mozart. She performed Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and impressed the British Daily Telegraph. “She placed this work in the 18th century without evoking false premonitions of the coming Beethoven,” the paper said, “while placing her work over the chasm that already separated Beethoven and Mozart.” wrote.
In October 1959, she made her American debut in Minneapolis, performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto in B flat major with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra.
Ross Parmenter wrote in a book review for The New York Times, “To the acclaim of the audience, the pianist returned to the stage five times, and the members of the orchestra joined in the applause.”
Ms. Hebler, who was a Baroness but did not use the title, gave her first New York recital at Hunter College in 1976, adding works by Schubert and Debussy to her program and inspiring audiences with her interpretations of Mozart. but it shines as usual in Mozart’s selection.
Donal Hennahan, in his review for The Times, wrote, “This was Mozart unclouded and untroubled,” and “consistent with the last century’s view that he was a miraculously blessed child. ‘ said.
Ms. Hebler continued to tour into the early part of the century. Her numerous recordings (many of them for Phillips) covered a wide variety of composers, but the ones that stood out were those of Mozart. Critic Richard Perry, reviewing a Mozart sonata recorded at the Kingston Whig Standard in Ontario in 1990, focused on what made her so refreshingly different.
“In a world of concerts filled with pianists of dizzying technique, seemingly forced to show grit at every turn by competition and cavernous concert halls, Ms. Hebler’s Mozart poise and Simplicity is a rare treat,” he wrote.
Information about Mr. Hebler’s survivors was not immediately available.
Christopher F. Schutze contributed to the report.
