Ruth Laredo

Ruth Laredo (November 20, 1937May 25, 2005) was an American classical pianist.
She became known in the 1970s in particular for her premiere recordings of the 10 sonatas of Scriabin and the complete solo piano works of Rachmaninoff, for her Ravel recordings and, in the last sixteen and a half years before her death, for her series in the Metropolitan Museum of Art “Concerts with Commentary”. She was often referred to as “America's First Lady of the Piano”.
Biography.
Ruth Meckler was born on November 20, 1937 in Detroit, Michigan, the elder of two daughters of Miriam Meckler-Horowitz, a piano teacher, and Ben Meckler, an English teacher. When Ruth was only two years old and untaught, she was able to play "God Bless America" on her mother's piano.
When Ruth was eight years old, her mother took her to a concert of Vladimir Horowitz in the Masonic Auditorium in Detroit. After the concert, Ruth vowed to become a concert pianist. Horowitz played Scriabin, and Laredo was so fascinated by this music that she developed a lifelong passion for Scriabin and other Russian composers, including Scriabin's contemporary Rachmaninoff.
In 1960, Meckler moved to New York City and married the Bolivian-born violinist Jaime Laredo, who was three-and-a half-years younger. She had met him at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and they performed together regularly until their divorce in 1974 (in some publications, erroneously given as 1976). Their union produced a daughter in 1969, Jennifer, who is married to Paul Watkins, chief conductor and music director of the English Chamber Orchestra. Jennifer Laredo Watkins lives in London.
During the pregnancy and after the birth of her daughter, Ruth Laredo cut back on touring with her husband. Keen to record the music of Scriabin, she approached various record companies with the proposal to record all ten sonatas. Alan Silver from the Connoisseur Society agreed to take the risk, although initially only for one LP (Sonatas No. 5, No. 7, “White Mass”, No. 9, “Black Mass”, Eight Etudes, Op. 42). After the success of this first recording, Connoisseur engaged her to record the remaining seven sonatas, thus making Laredo the first pianist to have recorded the complete cycle: this milestone marked the beginning of her public acclaim as a solo artist.
Laredo explained in "The Ruth Laredo Becoming a Musician Book" (published in 1992) that it was an alternative way to embark upon a solo career to find a niche repertoire. The more obvious route would have been to win competitions, but apart from the Young Concert Artists International Auditions Laredo never had any success in important competitions.
When her daughter was older, Laredo resumed touring with her husband, but was confronted with his wish to divorce. Finalized in 1974, the divorce pushed Laredo into a personal crisis. She took a teaching job at Yale University and accepted an invitation from Thomas Z. Shepard from CBS Masterworks, who was impressed by the Scriabin recordings, to record the complete solo piano works of Rachmaninoff. This project, said Laredo, saved her life, and with the Rachmaninoff recordings, made from 1974 to 1979 (the latest album released in 1981), her solo career gathered momentum.
After her landmark recordings, the international music publisher C. F. Peters commissioned Ruth Laredo to edit a new Urtext edition of the complete 24 Preludes of Rachmaninoff, which were published in 1981 (Op. 3, No. 2), 1985 (Op. 23) and 1991 (Op. 32). Laredo thought that many of the markings in the commonly used Rachmaninoff editions were not those of the composer; after studying original manuscripts, which she found in the Library of Congress and in the Rachmaninoff archive in Washington, D.C., and later in the Glinka Museum during her tour to Russia in 1989, her suspicions were confirmed. Her editions were much closer to the composer's original manuscripts.
Laredo wrote articles for the magazines "Piano Today" and "Keyboard Classics" ,and hosted programs for National Public Radio (NPR), "Performance Today" and "Morning Edition"), and the New York classical radio station "WQXR (First Hearing" and "Onstage with Young Concert Artists").
In 2000, Laredo appeared in a scene of Woody Allen's movie "Small Time Crooks", in which Hugh Grant's character tries to impress Tracey Ullman's character by taking her to a piano recital, where Ruth Laredo is playing Rachmaninoff.
Laredo was known for wearing striking gowns (most of them made by Lincoln Center's costume designer Catherine Heiser) on stage, which were frequently shown in fashion magazines. She was often seen riding her bicycle or jogging while listening to the music of Phil Collins or the rock group Genesis around Manhattan's Upper West Side, where she lived.
Laredo had a strong commitment to Jewish tradition. In a lecture in the "Concerts with Commentary" series about Felix Mendelssohn, she discussed the significance and depth of the composer's Jewish background. Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy's decision to convert to Protestantism, said Laredo, was a practical means to ensure his son's acceptance into the music profession in Germany.
Laredo died in her sleep at home on May 25, 2005, of ovarian cancer, a diagnosis made four years earlier, but which did not stop her from giving concerts. She is buried in Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, New York, a few meters from the grave of Sergei Rachmaninoff, who was so important to her life. At the funeral on May 31, 2005, two of her closest colleagues performed: Wei Gang Li from the Shanghai Quartet, and Courtenay Budd, with whom – along with the St. Petersburg String Quartet – she had given her last “Concert with Commentary” on May 6, 2005.
On May 18, 2006, her daughter Jennifer organized a memorial concert in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The participants were the Guarneri Quartet (with Paul Watkins, Jennifer's husband), Courtenay Budd, Nicolas Kendall, Pei Yao Wang, Edmund Battersby, James Tocco, Susan Wadsworth, director of the "Young Concert Artists", and the flutist Paula Robison. Courtenay Budd sang Ruth Laredo's favourite song, Franz Schubert's "An die Musik", the title of which Jennifer had chosen for the inscription on her mother's gravestone.
In 2007, the Ruth Laredo Memorial Prize of the Young Concert Artists International Auditions was endowed with contributions from her family and friends and admirers. Laredo had won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions Award in 1962, and later was a frequent and devoted member of the Jury of the Auditions. Winners of the Memorial Prize include Benjamin Moser, Germany, pianist; Bella Hristova, Bulgaria, violinist; Charlie Albright, US, pianist; and George Li, US, pianist.
Education.
Ruth Laredo's mother Miriam Meckler, a piano teacher mainly for children, taught Ruth first. When the time came for more formal training in 1947, she sent her to Edward Bredshall. Bredshall had studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and was known for his effective methods of teaching. She studied with him four years, and he introduced her to the music of other Russian composers, notably Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Kabalevsky.
Her preference for Russian music led her to team up with a Russian émigré, Mischa Kottler, who also was the teacher of the pianist and singer Muriel Elizabeth Charbonneau and later of the saxophonist and composer Rick Margitza and the jazz pianist Ray Cooke.
From 1951 to 1955 Laredo attended Mumford High School in Detroit. During summer vacations she enjoyed the Indian Hill Summer Workshops in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. After her graduation in 1955 she began her studies with Rudolf Serkin at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She had been introduced to Serkin in 1954 by the violinist Berl Senofsky and the pianist Seymour Lipkin, both of whom she knew from the summer camps. Serkin told her at her audition in Marlboro, Vermont: “I can see that you play like a tiger!” He accepted her as one of only four students.
Rudolf Serkin, a student of Arnold Schoenberg and himself an artist of worldwide reputation, was known for his complete dedication to the music, and his fidelity to the composer. At first, he took a dim view of Laredo's passion for the music of Russian composers; his tastes ran to the Mozart-Beethoven-Schubert-Brahms line of Central European composers. Despite this, Ruth Laredo would become known later for her Scriabin and Rachmaninoff recordings and performances.
Ruth Laredo spent many summers at the Marlboro Music School and Festival near Brattleboro, Vermont, which had been founded in 1950 by Rudolf Serkin and Adolf Busch (then called "School of Music"). There she continued her studies with Serkin and was coached in chamber music by the cellist Pablo Casals. Fellow students included Murray Perahia, Richard Goode (currently artistic director of the festival, together with Mitsuko Uchida), Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma. At the end of each festival season, the traditional closing work was Beethoven's Choral Fantasy, Op. 80, with Rudolf Serkin as soloist and the entire Marlboro community in the chorus.
Ruth Laredo graduated in 1960 with a diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music and a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Her graduation took place on a celebration of the fiftieth birthday of the American composer Samuel Barber. By coincidence she had prepared his Sonata in E-flat minor, Op. 26 for her graduation recital, and so became part of the celebration. Barber was in the audience and came back to her after the concert, very warmly congratulated her, and wrote on her copy of the Sonata: “Brava, bravissima.”
Teaching.
At the Curtis Institute of Music and at the summer music festival of the Meadowmount School of Music in Elizabethtown, New York, Ruth Laredo was chosen by the violin pedagogue Ivan Galamian and the cellist Leonard Rose to be the piano accompanist for their students, among them Arnold Steinhardt, Michael Tree, Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman.
Ruth Laredo was a member of the faculties of Kent State University (1968–71), Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, the Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia, and the Manhattan School of Music, New York City. She gave master classes in those institutions and at the Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester), Indiana University Bloomington, the New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California, and Princeton University. For some time she held the "Wiley Housewright Eminent Scholar Chair" at the Florida State University, Tallahassee. Among her students were the American composer and pianist Curt Cacioppo; Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of the New York Times; the Czech pianist Adam Skoumal; and the Swiss pianist Oliver Schnyder.
Laredo served as a jury member for several competitions, among them the "Young Concert Artists International Auditions", the "Naumburg Foundation Competition", the "Seventeen Magazine Competition", the "New York City Competition", all New York City, and the "William Kapell International Piano Competition", Maryland. As late as 2004 she was a jury member of the "International Piano-e-Competition" in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. “We had no idea she was ill,” competition director and pianist Alexander Braginsky told the Minneapolis Star Tribune after Laredo's death. “She was so feisty and opinionated, a powerful personality.”
Concerts.
Ruth Laredo appeared on stage as a little girl in the "Music Club of Metropolitan Detroit". When she was 11, she gave both her first recital in the Detroit Institute of Arts (among the pieces the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2, where her teacher Edward Bredshall played the orchestral part), and, under Karl Krueger, her first concert with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, with whom she played the second and third movements of the concerto.
She spent much of the first decade of her career as accompanist to her husband Jaime Laredo. At the same time she tried to establish herself as a soloist and in 1962 she made her orchestral debut in Carnegie Hall with the American Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski. Unfortunately the debut attracted little attention, and it was some time before she became recognized as a solo performer.
She was a founding member of the "Music from Marlboro Concerts" and in 1965 participated in their first tour, which included a visit to Israel where she played Johann Sebastian Bach's Concerto for three pianos in D minor with Rudolf and Peter Serkin. She appeared in the very first Music from Marlboro Concert, “Isaac Stern and Friends”, in Carnegie Hall in New York City.
Her solo career had a major boost in 1974, when she gave her debut in Avery Fisher Hall at New York's Lincoln Center. Her performance of Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major with the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Pierre Boulez, was met with enthusiastic critical acclaim. In 1976 "Young Concert Artists" presented her solo recital debut in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center with pieces of Beethoven, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff and Ravel, whose “La Valse” would become her signature piece. Her encore in this concert was Gershwin's Second Piano Prelude. In 1981 she made her solo recital debut in Carnegie Hall with a program entitled “Homage to Rachmaninoff”, which included works by Chopin, Beethoven and Scriabin.
In 1988 Laredo participated at the celebration of the 135th anniversary of the first Steinway piano, and the 500,000th piano manufactured by that company. The concert, hosted by Van Cliburn, featured 27 famed pianists, including Alfred Brendel, Shura Cherkassky, Murray Perahia, Rudolf Serkin and Alexis Weissenberg. Laredo played Rachmaninoff's Prelude Op. 32, No. 5 and Coquette from Robert Schumann's Carnaval, Op. 9.
Besides New York City and Detroit, Laredo performed in Washington, D.C. (Kennedy Center, Library of Congress, 1966 in the White House together with her then-husband Jaime Laredo for President Lyndon B. Johnson), in Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Indianapolis, Maryland, Nashville, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Toronto, at numerous festivals, among them the "Amadeus Festival/Midsummer Nights Festival" in New Jersey, the "Aspen Music Festival and School" in Aspen, Colorado, the "Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival" in Bridgehampton, New York, the "Caramoor International Music Festival" in Katonah, New York, the "Eastern Music Festival" in Greensboro, North Carolina, the "Maverick Concerts Festival" in Hurley, New York, the "Spoleto Festival USA" in Charleston, South Carolina, the "Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival" in Detroit, the "Music Mountain Summer Chamber Music Festival" in Falls Village, Connecticut and the "Casals Festival" in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She made tours in the season 1976/1977 to Europe (Netherlands, Germany) and Japan, and 1979 to Japan and Hong Kong. Particularly remarkable was her tour in 1989 to Russia (then RSFSR, Moscow, St. Petersburg [then Leningrad]) and the Ukraine (then USSR, Odessa). For an American to come to Russia to play the music of Russian composers – in the same room of the Moscow Conservatory where Rachmaninoff had played – was an extraordinary undertaking. Laredo enjoyed a very warm welcome by the audience and her concerts were sold out. In the Glinka Museum in Moscow she had the opportunity to see Rachmaninoff's original manuscripts.
In addition to the New York Philharmonic, the Detroit and the American Symphony Orchestra, Ruth Laredo played among others with the Philadelphia, the Cleveland and the American Composers Orchestra, the Baltimore, Beaumont, Boston, Greenwich, Houston, Indianapolis, Jupiter, Madison, National, New Jersey, St. Louis and
Terre Haute Symphony Orchestra, the Buffalo and the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra under Kazimierz Kord, with whom in 1993 she performed in Warsaw in a "United Nations Day Concert", which was broadcast by TV stations all around Europe, and then toured with the orchestra through the US culminating in a concert in Carnegie Hall with Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 1.
In the 1988/1989 season she began her series “Concerts with Commentary” (first called “Speaking of Music”) in the "Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium" of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. The series ran for 17 seasons until the last concert on May 6, 2005, shortly before her death. The programs became very popular and therefore she performed them in other cities of the USA.
The series included works from Brahms, Chopin, Dvořák, Fauré, Franck, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Clara and Robert Schumann, Scriabin and Tchaikovsky, which she discussed before the performances with great engagement. The final concert was the third of a series entitled “The Russian Spirit” with music from Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Shostakovich.
On September 13, 2001, only two days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, Ruth Laredo celebrated the 25th anniversary of her debut in the Alice Tully Hall with a recital as the opening concert of Lincoln Center's 2001 season. Before the concert, she explained to the audience why she had not cancelled the event: “It was important for me to play. Great music gives us spiritual sustenance and gives us hope. It is in that spirit that I play tonight.” The program was similar to that of her debut in 1976 and included works by Robert Schumann, Beethoven, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff and Ravel, with Chopin's Waltz Op. 69, No. 1 as the encore.
In September 2004 Laredo was invited by the Russian ministry of culture to participate in the International Festival of the Rimsky-Korsakov St. Petersburg State Conservatory. At this event, dedicated to the 200th birthday of the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka, she played chamber music as well as solo recitals and gave a master class for Russian students.
She was noted for her strong commitment to chamber music and said that soloists particularly need this experience as a preparation for concerts with big orchestras. “The lack of it is evident when a soloist performs as if the orchestra were a mere accompaniment,” Laredo said. She collaborated frequently with the Shanghai Quartet (regularly at the Music Mountain Festival), and among others with the American, Budapest, Emerson, Manhattan, Muir, St. Lawrence, St. Petersburg, Veronika and the Vermeer Quartet, with the Chappaqua, Manhattan Chamber, Orpheus Chamber and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, with the Philharmonia Virtuosi, the Sea Cliff Chamber Players and the Orchestra of St. Luke's. She appeared with the Guarneri Quartet and the Tokyo String Quartet in the Lincoln Center series "Great Performers". She helped the Tokyo String Quartet several times when a member of the Quartet was indisposed transforming the group temporarily into a piano quartet. Since their first association in 1980 in Alice Tully Hall, she toured each season with the flutist Paula Robison as the “Paula and Ruth” duo.
Ruth Laredo also played contemporary music, mainly in the beginning of her career in Marlboro. This was something Pablo Casals – who did not like music beyond the era of Brahms – disapproved of. He would stay home when Leon Kirchner would come to Marlboro for a performance. In the 1983/1984 season she played the world premiere of Peter Martins's work called "Waltzes" with the New York City Ballet. In 1989 she played Wallingford Riegger's twelve-tone "Variations for Piano and Orchestra" at Carnegie Hall with the American Composers Orchestra under Paul Lustig Dunkel. Her repertoire included also works by Franz Liszt, Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, Anton Webern and Alban Berg.
In 1994 Laredo played with jazz pianist Marian McPartland and from 1996 with her and Dick Hyman in programs entitled "Three Piano Crossover".
In the last years of her life, her career as a soloist with orchestras waned, but she was comfortable with a mix of recitals and chamber concerts.
Laredo criticized the rising trend in the US of recording live concerts for broadcast as “troublesome”. She preferred the European method of recording the music in radio studios for subsequent broadcast.
Recordings.
In 1967 Ruth Laredo recorded a well-received album of piano music by French composer Maurice Ravel, also renowned for music full of pianistic challenges.
In 1970 Laredo made her famous premiere recordings of Scriabin's 10 sonatas on three LPs for "Connoisseur Society" (reissued in 1984 by Nonesuch Records on a three-LP box and in 1996 on a double CD). She made the recordings in St. Paul's Chapel at Columbia University, New York City, on a Baldwin SD-10 grand piano. The Scriabin LPs were released in a period where little of Scriabin's music was available, and Laredo's recordings led to his rising popularity in the USA. "I was kind of a crusader for his music," said Laredo.
From 1974 to 1981 followed Rachmaninoff's complete solo piano works on seven LPs for CBS Masterworks (reissued in 1993 by Sony Classical on five CDs), a project no pianist before had ever dared to undertake (at the same time the German-American pianist Michael Ponti also recorded the Scriabin and Rachmaninoff works). At this time she was a relative rarity as a female piano soloist, particularly in the technically demanding and muscular works of Rachmaninoff. There were only a few others – Gina Bachauer, Myra Hess and later Alicia de Larrocha, for example. The New York Daily News baptised her now “America's First Lady of the Piano”, an appellation which was later used by many others. Laredo initially disliked this as she felt it was sexist: she wanted to be known as a pianist, not a “woman pianist” Later she relented and used the title herself in her book and on her website.
The preparations for the recording of Rachmaninoff's solo piano works proved to be very exhausting. Laredo said she now understood why some of the pieces had never been played by anybody: it was simply because they were so hard. Rachmaninoff, who was 6 feet 4 inches tall with correspondingly large hands, had composed many of his works for himself. One could only wonder how the tiny 5-foot-1-inch Laredo was able to play Rachmaninoff's pieces, some of which indulged in 11-key stretches. After practicing the music of “Rocky”, as she called Rachmaninoff, she had to get her hands massaged.
Ruth Laredo also recorded more than 20 albums featuring works of other composers, among them Isaac Albéniz, Bach, Beethoven, Lili Boulanger, Brahms, Chopin, Falla, Debussy, Khachaturian, Fauré, Mozart, Poulenc, Ravel, Clara and Robert Schumann, Tchaikovsky as well as of the American composers Barber, Aaron Copland, Ives, Laderman, Kirchner, Rorem and Siegmeister. Especially acclaimed was the recording with James Tocco of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" in the version for two pianos for Gasparo Records.
Laredo made her last recordings in 1999 with the Shanghai Quartet, who called her “the fifth member of the Shanghai Quartet” for Arabesque Records (piano quartets by Brahms) and at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival with the violinist Philip Setzer for Newport Classic (“Day Music” by Ned Rorem; the CD contains also Norem's “War Scenes” and “End of Summer” performed by other artists, including the composer at the piano). Both CDs were released in 2000.
Probably the last radio program was the one with jazz pianist Marian McPartland for NPR. The date was February 19, 2004.