| Biography | Katharina Wolpe was born in Vienna, to Ola Okuniewska, a sensitive and original painter, and the composer and teacher Stefan Wolpe. Her father migrated to Palestine when Katharina was still a small child, and then settled in the US. In 1938, Katharina and her mother escaped from Vienna, remained in hiding for eight months and walked to Serbia, where they stayed in a relative's house before moving on. Katharina began to play the piano in a refugee camp, later revealing that the music of Schubert had made her not feel homeless, and so kept her in one piece. In Switzerland her mother eventually abandoned her, and Katharina suffered all sorts of vicissitudes and adventures. Eventually she reached Britain, where her mother rejoined her. Katharina married the sculptor and painter William Turnbull and they lived in Paris for two years.
After hearing her play at a London club, Humphrey Bogart paid for her Wigmore Hall debut. As her performing career developed, she also began to teach, eventually taking the advanced piano class at Morley College, London, for many years. Her Proms debut came with the first performance of a work by Elisabeth Lutyens, Symphonies, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in July 1961. A month later she was back, having learned the Schoenberg Piano Concerto at very short notice when another soloist dropped out, and went on to give Proms performances of concertos by Mozart and Beethoven.
She married the conductor Lawrence Leonard and, when he became the principal conductor of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, Alberta (1968-73), she accompanied him to Canada, where she became pianist in residence at the University of Toronto, and taught there frequently after returning to London. Both her marriages ended in divorce.
An eloquent champion of her father's music, Katharina brought out both its roots in the second Viennese school and its multi-faceted modernity, influenced by jazz and other non-classical musics. Iain Hamilton was one of the composers who, along with Lutyens, wrote music especially for her. In later years, her humanitarian politics as well as her love of all the arts led her to form a performing partnership with Vanessa Redgrave. |