Irene Scharrer

Irene Scharrer (born February 2, 1888 in London , † January 11, 1971 there ) was an English pianist.

Scharrer was a student of Tobias Matthay and studied at the Royal Academy of Music . In 1904 she played with Myra Hess Weber's invitation to dance in an arrangement by Paul Corder for two pianos. This was the beginning of a longstanding collaboration between the two pianists as a piano duo.

As a soloist, Scharrer made her debut at the age of 16 at Wigmore Hall with Chopin's second piano sonata. In 1914 she appeared in the Queen's Hall , conducted by Landon Ronald with Schumann and Tchaikovsky on piano concerto. Concert tours have taken her to France, Holland, Belgium, Scandinavia and the USA. In Germany she performed under Hans Richter and Arthur Nikisch in Leipzig and Berlin.

Scharrer made the first recordings for the Gramophone Company as early as 1909 . From the time before the First World War there are recordings of the Etudes by Chopin, Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody , Sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti and the Five Variations on It's a long way to Tipperary by Arthur Murray Goodhart . In the 1920s, Scharrer recorded piano works by Scarlatti, Henry Purcell and William Boyce as well as a complete piano sonata by Mozart .

In 1929 she moved to Columbia Records , where she made many of her earlier recordings again, including Liszt's paraphrase on Rigoletto , the Andante and Rondo Capriccioso by Mendelssohn Bartholdy and the Scherzo from Henry Litolff's Concerto Symphonique . The last recordings were made in the mid-1930s.