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Monthly Archive: January 2024

Ingrid Haebler Plays Schubert – Four Impromptus, Piano Sonata – SWR

Ingrid Haebler Plays Schubert – Four Impromptus, Piano Sonata – SWR

by | Jan 2, 2024 | Classical CD Reviews, Classical Reissue Reviews

SCHUBERT Four Impromptus, D. 899; Piano Sonata in G Major, D. 894 – Ingrid Haebler, piano – SWR19435CD (7/20/23) (61:18) [Distr. by Naxos] **** Viennese pianist Ingrid Haebler (1926?–2023) remained a staunch advocate for the Classical tradition, imbuing her impressive legacy of Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert with an innate dignity, clarity, and elegance of line.  The Schubert sonatas from SWR derive from Stuttgart studios: the Sonata in G from February 1, 1957, and the set of Impromptus from June, 1954. Haebler could attribute much of her undemonstrative, natural fluency of delivery to the pedagogy of masters Paul Weingarten, Marguerite Long; and Nikita Magaloff. Haebler’s consistent sense of the balanced phrase has much in common with the style of another Classicist pianist, the Hungarian Lily Kraus. The 1826 “Fantasie Sonata” of Schubert finds Haebler in studied, nuanced attention to the work Robert Schumann deemed “the most perfect in form and conception” of the Schubert sonata oeuvre.  Her capacity to render each phrase and transitional sequence of the opening Molto moderato e cantabile in an arioso sonority invests an unbroken sense of spiritual serenity in this work, in spite of its occasional sojourns into emotional anguish, notably marked in minor key fff at the inception of the development. […]