Imogen Cooper studied the piano with Kathleen Long and at the age of twelve was sent to the Paris Conservatoire to continue her studies with Jacques Février and Yvonne Lefébure. She then went to Vienna to study with Alfred Brendel, Jörg Demus and Paul Badura-Skoda and won the Mozart Memorial Prize in 1969. Cooper has had an international career performing with many of the world’s great orchestras.
Although her repertoire is fairly broad, Cooper has a reputation as a Schubert specialist. She also plays and has commissioned some twentieth-century works including one by Thomas Adès that she premièred at the Cheltenham Festival in 1996. In 1984 Cooper played a series of Schubert’s late piano works at the Wigmore Hall in London. She had received guidance from Clifford Curzon in these works and was approached by the Dutch record company Ottavo who wanted to record her Schubert interpretations. When asked about these recordings of Schubert she said, ‘Of course, my enthusiasm has been fed by listening and absorbing performances by Fischer, Schnabel, Curzon and Brendel, but I think I have grown into my own way of performing him.’
Cooper’s Schubert cycle for Ottavo was entitled The Last Six Years 1823–1828. Six discs were released containing works written during this period. The Sonata in A major D. 959 is particularly fine, and a disc of Schumann and Brahms, also for Ottavo, contains a wonderfully characteristic and sensitive Davidsbündlertänze Op. 6. A two-disc set of Schubert piano duets was released by Erato in 1979. Cooper’s partner here is Anne Queffélec, and in 1993 while recording Schubert, Schumann and Brahms for Ottavo, Cooper and Queffélec made another disc of duets, this time of works by Mozart.
For Philips, Cooper has recorded the major song cycles of Schubert and Schumann with Wolfgang Holzmair. The singer had previously recorded Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin D. 795 with Jörg Demus in the late 1980s, but of the 1997 recording of the cycle Alan Blyth wrote in The Gramophone, ‘Above all the rapport with his regular Philips partner, that nonpareil of a Schubertian, Imogen Cooper, more perceptive than Demus, enhances the whole interpretation. Her carefully graded dynamics…her buoyancy of rhythm in Ungeduld, her gentle, other-worldly rocking in Wiegenlied, these and much else are profoundly satisfying.’
After a performance of a Mozart piano concerto in Australia in December 2000, a critic wrote, ‘The undoubted high-point of the concert…came with Imogen Cooper’s account of the Mozart K. 595 Concerto…Cooper’s account of the work was, on the one hand, a master-class in Mozart-playing, on the other, so far removed from any hint of the academy or the classroom that it sounded throughout as if she was just easing her way through an exchange of ideas on the work with the members of the Australian Chamber Orchestra.’
© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — Jonathan Summers (A–Z of Pianists, Naxos 8.558107–10).