Annie Fischer was the least controversial of pianists. By this I do not mean she invited a bland response, but rather a unanimous awe and affection. She was Klemperer’s first choice for his London Beethoven cycle while pianists – who it has to be said can be less than generous about each other – were lost in admiration, their love untainted by jealousy or rivalry. For Sviatoslav Richter (who could be notoriously critical) she was ‘an artist imbued with the spirit of greatness and with a genuine profundity’. Pollini heard in her playing ‘a childlike simplicity, immediacy and wonder’. For Tamás Vásáry and András Schiff, her fellow Hungarians, she was a ‘phenomenon’, a beacon of light amid the trials and tribulations of the music world. Such praise, and from such distinguished sources!

In Schumann, Fischer’s fierce integrity was balanced by an inimitable sense of the tender and wistful, and in Beethoven she was no less responsive to the composer’s bluff humour. She confessed to a dislike of ‘empty’ piano-playing, taking a dim view of note-spinners and narcissists in love with the sound of their own playing. True, there were times when her urgency and way of ‘letting go’, of refusing to hide behind propriety or convention, caused her to overreach, but such momentary losses of control, while regrettable, were always worth the risk. She was never a pianist for whom safety came first.

So to ICA’s treasurable new release of performances recorded for the BBC in London in 1975. Schubert’s Impromptus, D935, are familiar Annie Fischer fare, though in such direct and indirect playing they tingle with unfamiliarity. But the Schumann F sharp minor Sonata is a reminder that while she specialised in Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, she made frequent excursions into the Romantics; both Schumann’s First and Chopin’s Second Sonatas appeared regularly in her programmes. And here, in the Schumann, you find her revelling in the unorthodox, with the composer’s Romantic and whimsical breaking with all notion of Classical formality. The Sonata was dedicated ‘to Clara from Florestan and Eusebius’, and rarely has there been a more audacious interplay between those two fictions. Clara, on the alert for possible excess, must have been amazed, fearing incomprehension of her husband’s far-reaching poetry. Perhaps the Alla burla, ma pomposo instruction at the heart of the Intermezzo took the joke too far, while the finale’s opening subject with its heavy tread and the following wildly skipping syncopation surely lay outside the boundaries of taste and discretion. And it is just this feeling of boldness and seeming eccentricity that is so memorably caught by Annie Fischer. Here is all of Schumann’s madcap freedom (‘sometimes I think I will sing myself to death’ his tragically prophetic cry). Other pianists, notably Gilels and Pollini, have brought their own distinctive and superb voices to their recordings, yet Annie Fischer, whether in the heartfelt Aria (for Liszt ‘a song of great passion expressed with fullness and calm’) or in the rush of adrenalin in the final pages, is inimitable and gloriously true to her own lights. This is a vital addition to Fischer’s discography.

Schubert Four Impromptus, D935 Schumann Piano Sonata No 1, Op 11

Annie Fischer pf

ICA Classics ICAC5178

This review originally appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of International Piano. Never miss an issue – subscribe today