Igor Kipnis

Keyboardist of 'uncanny' ability

Igor Kipnis, harpsichordist and pianist: born Berlin 27 September 1930; married Judith Robison (one son, marriage dissolved); died Redding, Connecticut 23 January 2002.

Igor Kipnis was probably the world's busiest harpsichordist. He made over 80 recordings, 57 of them solo albums, and performed on every continent except Antarctica, and with virtually every conductor and chamber musician of stature. He was three times voted "best harpsichordist" by the readers of the American magazine Keyboard; he was their "best classical keyboardist" twice. The recording industry acknowledged his stature with six Grammy nominations and the coveted Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik.

Kipnis was born in 1930, in Berlin, where his father, the Russian bass Alexander Kipnis, was one of the leading operatic voices of the day. Although Jewish, Alexander Kipnis enjoyed sufficient popularity to give him temporary immunity from the initial waves of Nazi anti-Semitism. But the writing was on the wall, and the family moved to Vienna in 1935 and in 1938, with the Anschluss, they emigrated to the United States – Alexander, who had sung at the Chicago Civic Opera between 1923 and 1932, had taken out American citizenship in 1931.

As an infant Igor travelled around the world with his parents and was brought up with music all about him, live and recorded – his father was an avid collector of lieder and opera on 78s. Igor was given early lessons by his maternal grandfather, the composer Heniot Lévy, head of piano at the American Conservatory in Chicago. With Alexander now singing at the Metropolitan Opera, the family settled in Westport, Connecticut, where Igor continued his piano lessons – although he had no intention of becoming a professional musician.

His first encounter with a harpsichord came about through his passion for record collecting, when he was surprised to find Wanda Landowska's recording of Bach's Second English Suite tucked into the end of the fifth and final volume of Edwin Fischer's (piano) recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier. But his fascination soon grew. It was at Harvard, where he took a degree in social relations and had his eyes on a career in radio, television or record production, that Kipnis first put his hands on the instrument – he was studying Handel in a course given by the composer Randall Thompson.

The fuse was slow-burning: he spent two years in the army during the Korean war, teaching signals communications; he sold books and records at a store in Grand Central Station, New York; and he worked as assistant record librarian at a radio station. In 1957, when he was art and editorial director of Westminster Records, and beginning to write reviews for the American Record Guide, his father bought a small, two-manual harpsichord for him – "He thought that I should have something to exercise my fingers on after work as opposed to vegetating in front of the television set."

Kipnis had accompanied his father's students on the piano for years, learning to appreciate the importance of a singing line at the keyboard. But with his new instrument he had found his métier. He made his début within two years, and two years after that he went freelance, playing continuo in various groups and augmenting his income from performing with reviewing for The New York Herald Tribune and Stereo Review.

He was essentially self-taught, although he took advice from the noted harpischordist Fernando Valenti as well as Melville Smith, an authority on 18th-century French keyboard practice; his principal mentor he considered to be the British musicologist Thurston Dart, with whom he had studied at Harvard – but he considered his father the weightiest influence on his music-making. He made his first solo recordings and by 1964 had a contract from CBS; Angel, the US branch of HMV, tempted him their way in 1972.

Kipnis had settled the previous year in Redding, Connecticut, where he lived until his death. The stimulus was an appointment to nearby Fairfield University, first as associate professor of fine arts from 1971 to 1975, a full-time position, and then for the next four years as artist in residence. There he somehow balanced a punishing concert schedule of around 50 solo and orchestral appearances a year with teaching, directing a local chamber-music series and an early-music festival. He gave master-classes, workshops and lectures across North, Central and South America, Europe and the Near and Far East, with Britain among his ports of call: he was a visiting tutor at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester in 1982.

His concert programmes were often designed to "make friends for the harpsichord", as he put it, drawing on his vast repertoire to pique his listeners' interest. In one of his eclectic mixes, a variable bill of fare entitled "The Light and Lively Harpsichord" that stretched from the 16th century to boogie-woogie, he would add rags, blues, tangos and works by Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck to music by Bach, Scarlatti and other more readily predictable names. And, like Wanda Landowska before him, he stimulated a minor explosion in new works for the harpsichord: among the composers who wrote works for him were Richard Rodney Bennett, Barbara Kolb, Dan Locklair, John McCabe, George Rochberg, Ned Rorem and Eric Salzman.

In the early 1990s Kipnis was sent a double album of the Chopin Mazurkas performed by a young pianist called Karen Kushner and wrote enthusiastically about "her wonderful performances, which I likened in their spontaneity and temperament to that of a young Arthur Rubinstein". They met soon afterwards, "and we decided, purely for fun because we both liked Ravel and most particularly his Ma Mère l'oye, to read through the original one piano, four-hands score". Thus, in 1995, the Kipnis-Kushner Duo was founded. Together they developed an educational programme to introduce children to music and played to them all across America – Kipnis was always concerned with building the concert audiences of tomorrow.

He was also a regular commentator on national and local radio. He collected autographs as well as recordings. At the time of his death he was close to finishing a biography of his father, co-written with Barry Lenson. He edited music for his instrument. And he was a good enough photographer to enjoy several exhibitions of his pictures. In concerto rehearsals he would take advantage of orchestral tuttis to grab his camera and snatch a photograph of the conductor.

Kipnis's musicianship was the envy of his colleagues. One, Bunker Clark, reported his "uncanny ability to improvise variants on repeats within Baroque pieces, most notably in the suites of Handel". His teaching, like his playing, was concerned with communication. Rhio Barnhart recalls lessons in Kipnis' small Greenwich Village apartment in the 1960s, on an instrument "that dominated the living room and shared space with a very large statue of Buddha". Kipnis told him,

You have to play French music with a certain sense of detachment – imagine you are watching a really beautiful woman across the room while playing.

Another student, Judith Schwartz, was captivated by Kipnis's playing in the continuo aria "Erfreue dich Seele" in Bach's Cantata No 21: it was "the most joyous, vivacious rendition I had ever heard. It wasn't just the unusually quick tempo; there was something about the harpsichord playing that fairly twinkled". She approached him for advice and was astonished at his collegial generosity when he lent his handwritten copies of music to this complete stranger – an action she found "emblematic of a career aimed at bringing people to music". For Schwartz, as for everyone else who knew him, Kipnis

seemed first and foremost a communicator, an articulate and willing partner whether in conversation or performance. Whether one agreed with his audacious embellishments and swashbuckling tempi or not, one could hardly resist the spirit of fun emanating from his playing.

Martin Anderson