Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 20 / Symphony No. 39 / 9 Variations on a Minuet by Duport

In the preface he wrote to Jérôme Spycket's biography of Clara Haskil (Lausanne, 1975), Herbert von Karajan described her career as 'a long and often sorrowful march to glory'. Haskil had to battle with ill health, acute shyness and self-doubt, and more than her fair share of misfortunes throughout her life. Born into a musical family in Bucharest in 1895, she received her first piano lessons from her mother and entered the Bucharest Conservatoire at the age of six. A year later, in 1902, her uncle and guardian took her to Vienna. Here she became a pupil of Richard Robert, who also taught Rudolf Serkin and George Szell. Three years later, her uncle moved her on to the Paris Conservatoire, where she received the first prize for piano in 1910, at the age of 15. A year earlier she had won the first prize for violin at the Concours de l'Union française de la jeunesse.

Haskil immediately embarked on an international career as a piano soloist. But in 1913 she became progressively afflicted with scoliosis, a curvature of the spine. At times enshrouded in a large brace, she had to withdraw from the concert platform until 1920, when she returned to Paris from residencies in the Netherlands and Switzerland. She re-established herself, touring the USA annually between 1924 and 1926: Stokowski, with whom she played the Schumann Concerto, suggested that she was the most talented musician of her generation. In addition to solo work, she also partnered Enescu, Casals and Ysaÿe in chamber music. But without the oxygen of publicity and recording, musical careers were hard to establish in the interwar years, and living in Paris, with at times little paid work, life could be hard: private patronage was essential. Gradually, her situation began to improve: in 1936, following her uncle's death a couple of years earlier, she met Dinu Lipatti, who becamea close colleague. In addition, she started to record and to broadcast. However, the outbreak of war in 1939 led to a ban on her broadcasting, as she was an alien in France; as a Jew she narrowly avoided a Nazi round-up. By 1942 she had developed a brain tumour that was affecting her sight: following its successful removal she fled to Switzerland, later taking Swiss citizenship.

With the cessation of hostilities Haskil set about once again establishing herself as a successful concert pianist. Following a single concert and several broadcasts and recordings in London, she was invited to undertake two tours of the Netherlands in 1949 - these were sufficiently successful for her to begin to earn her living entirely from concert work. Her fame was further enhanced as a result of a recording contract signed with the Dutch company Philips in 1951, following some earlier recordings for the Decca and Westminster labels. She began to work with several of the most distinguished conductors of the period, including Fricsay, Kubelík, Munch and Schuricht, who described her as 'one of the greatest artists in the history of music'. But the effects of an ever-increasing concert schedule began to take its toll on her frail constitution. In 1957 she had to cancel engagements as a result of ill health, and in 1958 she suffered a heart attack in the middle of a performance, which resulted in a further period of withdrawal. She returned to concerts and recording during the following year, but her frailty was pronounced. On 6 December 1960 she slipped and fell at the main Brussels railway station, dying the following day at the age of 65.

The two major performances on this CD emanate from a concert tour that took place at the beginning of 1956, the year of Mozart's bicentenary. Conducted by Herbert von Karajan, who had specifically requested Haskil as his soloist of choice, it consisted of twelve concerts given between 25 January and 6 February: the first three took place in Vienna with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, after which the Philharmonia Orchestra took over, with the tour concluding in London.