Biography (read more)
Karl Rudolf Engel was born in Birsfelden, Switzerland, on 1 June 1923, studied with Paul Baumgartner at the Basel Conservatory and after the war with Alfred Cortot at the École Normale in Paris. Second prize at the 1952 Queen Elisabeth Competition opened an international career; he held a professorship in Hanover for three decades, and died in Chernex on 2 September 2006.
Engel’s discography maps exactly onto what this catalogue drained from his channel: complete Schumann piano works, a complete Mozart concerto cycle, and a vast art-song legacy with Edith Mathis, Elly Ameling and Hermann Prey. He is the Swiss branch of the Cortot line applied with German thoroughness — an accompanist and cyclist whose rows connect dozens of this site’s singers and works.
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