Tirelessly reissued and celebrated, Clara Haskil's partnership with Arthur Grumiaux in Mozart and Beethoven sonatas is now housed, together with other deeply characterful performances, in Philips's ''Clara Haskil: The Legacy''. And what a legacy it is, brimming over with musical zest yet drawing on an exalted delicacy and inwardness from what was clearly a 'still centre', a well of endless resource and nourishment. Haskil may have enjoyed a low profile until the autumn of her tragically short career, but her friends and admirers included Lipatti, Enescu, Stokowski, Cortot, Giulini and Tatyana Nikolaieva among others. Her range was exceptional. Before ill-health intervened her specialities included Brahms's Second and Saint-Saens's Fifth Concertos, while Brahms's Paganini Variations and Liszt's Feux follets featured in her solo recitals. Later, such exuberance was not so much cautioned or restrained as channelled into her superlative Beethoven, Schumann (has any one played the Abegg Variations with such dizzy aplomb or captured the Prophet Bird's quizzical stare with such uncanny directness?) and, most of all, her Mozart. Indeed, listening once again to Haskil's Mozart is like re-entering a musical Elysium. Everything sounds so exactly 'right', so gently but firmly unarguable.
Her sense of difference between Mozart and Beethoven is finely but unmistakably drawn. For just as she locates the underlying storms of Beethoven's more outgoing spirit, she finds no less exactly an equilibrium beneath even the clouded surface of Mozart's E minor Sonata, K304. In the greater, more ambitious utterances of K454 and in the moto perpetuo finale of K526 she miraculously makes every bar subtle and ambiguous without recourse to anything approaching overt drama or idiosyncrasy. The concertos, too, find this heaven-sent artist at her greatest. Here is no impersonal sheen or expertise, but a deeply committed poetry resolved in playing of the most crystalline perfection. Listen to her in the second movement cadenza of K271 and you may wonder when you last heard playing of such speculative beauty. Never, in my experience, has this ever astonishing Andantino sounded so profoundly and lucidly elegiac. Her first entry in K466 (the earlier of the two recordings here) is arched and nuanced in the spirit of a great singer, the inseparable nature of Mozart's vocal and instrumental inspiration made clear, capturing exactly the solo's grave reply to the orchestra's pulsing unease. There is no fashionable enigma (compare Richter in the same passage) but a poetic veracity achieved by only the greatest artists. In the C minor Concerto, K491 Haskil again tempers Mozart's intensity with a delicacy and restraint that encourages rather than diminishes such latent drama.
Haskil was famous for lifting her partner's performances on to the highest level. Instantly aware of her quality Grumiaux rarely played better than in the Beethoven sonatas, and you will have to go a long way to hear two artists in more perfect accord than in the great final G major Sonata's other-worldly musings. Then there are her solo Beethoven offerings: the Sonatas, Op. 31 Nos. 2 and 3. The first-movement repeat in the Tempest Sonata is hardly a carbon copy (like Richter's) but an opportunity for the most subtle realignment of perspective, and who but Haskil could so daringly relish the point at 4'44'' in the finale where the music's chromaticism is fleetingly prophetic of, say, Liszt's dark-hued impressionism in his final period?
Clearly, I could go on for ever celebrating this or that aspect of such life-enhancing artistry. You may demur at Haskil's Schubert (its perhaps predictably classical rather than romantic bias), Chopin, Ravel and Falla (an exotic departure from her principally German repertoire) yet all these performances are alive with passing felicities. Is the finale of Beethoven's Third Concerto too self-effacing, lacking, say, some of Serkin's salty brio? Is the Schumann Concerto disappointingly non-committal, without, say, Dame Myra Hess's warmth and affection? Did Haskil's energy start to fail at the time of the second recording of Beethoven's Op. 31 Sonatas (those tell-tale pauses for breath in the headlong equestrian finale of No. 3)? Such questions may well be asked. Yet her Mozart – that litmus test of musical quality – surely defies criticism, is profoundly musical rather than decorous; totally devoid of what Dr Leavis, in one of his most trenchant phrases, called ''the extant social world''.
The recordings vary but have been for the most part beautifully refurbished and no praise could be high enough for Philips's presentation. There are three superb accompanying essays and a beautiful selection of photographs. Haskil was a frail but indomitable spirit incapable of contrivance or artifice. And her artistry, like her compatriot Lipatti's, will surely shine out forever, impervious to changing taste or fashion.'