Recordings by the great Hungarian pianist Annie Fischer (1914-1995) are relatively scarce and her good name is known to only a few specialists. The injustice is even more flagrant by the fact that she is one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century. Her inspired and subtle romantic playing was lauded by critics and music lovers all over the world.
A refugee in Sweden during the war, she returned to her country of birth in 1946 where she studied at the famous Budapest Academy. Her discography really deserved to have been compiled and published as a major album. Unfortunately, the multiplicity of her editors made such a project difficult albeit impossible. From concertos with Klemperer for HMV to others with Fricsay at Deutsche Grammophone, Wolfgang Sawallisch and Efrem Kurtz and recitals for various labels, Fischer’s is a legacy one should be eager to discover.
Hugaroton have published Anna Dévény’s pirate recordings, an admirer of Annie Fischer who recorded all of the great pianist concerts since the 1970s up until the end of her career. Recorded on a top of the range cassette recorder, these recordings, completely ignored by Fischer, are made up of 32 Beethoven sonatas and a vast repertoire. They received the approval of Zoltàn Kocsis, also a fervent admirer of Annie Fischer. The microphone was placed in the best possible position, but far from the piano and often in some very noisy concert halls. One must therefore get used to the sound’s mediocrity which is quickly compensated for by the extraordinary musical sense of the pianist in Schubert’s Sonatas D. 845 and D. 959 (1978), played with a mix of tension and relaxation which allows an exploration of all Schubert’s emotional registers.
More immediate but of a louder ambiance and with some biting saturations, the 1981 piano breaks out into the extraordinary with Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, an impalpable dream on the edge of an imaginary world with a romantic and impassioned momentum. The sound recording becomes really too precarious to appreciate the 1978 Kreislerianas (Schumann) which is carried entirely by raw incandescence. Some great art that seems to have been stolen from behind a closed door… © François Hudry/Qobuz