Ingrid Haebler playing Moments Musicaux by Schubert. Following her studies in Austria, she attended the Geneva Conservatory (participating in the masterclasses of Nikita Magaloff) and then studied in Paris with Marguerite Long.

Her parents emigrated to Poland shortly after her birth and the family remained there until the outbreak of the second world war. Her father, Baron Armin von Haebler, was a Polish-born businessman with interests in the glass and metal industries, her mother, Sissy (nee von Schüch), a pianist who gave Ingrid her first lessons. The year of her birth was probably 1926 (the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung celebrated her 90th birthday in its issue of 20 June 2016), though 1929 is given in some sources she was subsequently as discreet about her personal life as she was on this point. An accomplished performer, she brought a high degree of artistry to the repertory in which she specialised, notwithstanding the relatively circumscribed emotional range of her interpretations. JS Bach and even early 20th-century composers (Stravinsky, for example) featured occasionally in her early international tours. Johann Christian, the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach, was living in London by the time of Mozart’s visit as a boy, and shortly after his death the younger composer based the Andante of his Piano Concerto No 12, K414, on a theme by him. She was also receptive at an early stage to period instruments and recorded the keyboard concertos of JC Bach on a fortepiano with the Capella Academica Wien under Eduard Melkus. Her catalogue of recordings is overwhelmingly dominated by Mozart and Schubert (she recorded all Mozart’s piano concertos, most of them twice, and all the sonatas of each composer), though scattered among them are pieces by Haydn, Beethoven, Schumann (including the Piano Concerto), Chopin and Franck (the Symphonic Variations). The Philips Legacy featuring the works of Ingrid Haebler.

Chopin sonata b flat minor