Ruth Laredo (November 20, 1937May 25, 2005) was an American classical pianist.
Laredo 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.Ruth Laredo, The Ruth Laredo Becoming a Musician Book, Schott/European American Music, 1992, , 1992
In 1946, 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,Cheryl Branham, Piano/Forte: A Study Of Women Concert Pianists’ Lives and Careers, Dissertation, University of Maryland, UMI No. 9622179, 1995 and with the Rachmaninoff recordings, made from 1974 to 1979 (the latest album released in 1981), her solo career gathered momentum.
In 1982 and 1986, Laredo performed with the Naumburg Orchestral Concerts, in the Naumburg Bandshell, Central Park, in the summer series.
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.David Dubal, Reflections from the Keyboard, The World Of the Concert Pianist, 2nd updated edition, Schirmer Trade Books, 1997 (1st edition 1984), Elaine Strauss in: U.S. 1, 118 across: Pianist Ruth, six letters. Any clues? Princeton, New Jersey, May 1998 (published at PrincetonInfo.com)
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 the Woody Allen film Small Time Crooks (2000), 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.Irma Commanday in: Jewish Women's Archive, 2005
On , Laredo died in her sleep at home 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, six days later, 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 favorite 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.
Laredo's 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;in: Gale Encyclopedia, 2005 (published at www.answer.com) 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 Montecito, 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.