Annie Fischer was born into a Jewish family in Budapest on 5 July 1914 and studied at the Liszt Academy with Ernő Dohnányi and Arnold Székely. She debuted at ten with Beethoven’s First Concerto, played Mozart and Schumann with the Zurich Tonhalle at twelve, and in 1933 won the first International Liszt Competition in her own city with the B minor Sonata. She spent the war years in Sweden, returned to Budapest, and played chiefly in Europe and Australia until her death on 10 April 1995.

Fischer’s Beethoven and Schubert belong to the small class of recordings that pianists themselves cite: playing of blazing concentration achieved without a trace of calculation, captured most completely in the Beethoven sonata cycle she recorded over fifteen years and refused to release in her lifetime. She stands in this catalogue as the counterweight to every studio-polished reading of the Viennese classics.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Fischer
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q291667