Catherine Collard

Catherine Collard, whose piano repertoire centered on Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Franz Joseph Haydn, also programmed prominent 20th-century scores by Arnold Schoenberg, Gilbert Amy, and Olivier Messiaen. She earned recognition as an educator whose recording activity continued for more than twenty years.

Born August 11, 1947, in the southern French commune of Thuir, Collard entered the Paris Conservatory at fourteen and worked with Germaine Mounier, Yvonne Loriod, and Yvonne Lefébure. There she captured First Prizes in piano in 1964 and chamber music in 1966. Additional distinctions followed at international competitions, among them the Olivier Messiaen Competition presented during the Royan Festival.

Her debut on disc came in 1972 with Philips, where she performed André Boucourechliev’s Archipel IV. In 1976 she joined the faculty of the Conservatory of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés as piano professor. While maintaining an active solo schedule, she forged a substantial collaborative practice whose most frequent partner was pianist Anne Queffélec; cellist Suzanne Ramon, flutist Philippe Bernold, and contralto Nathalie Stutzmann also appeared regularly with her.

During the 1970s and 1980s she recorded for several companies, most extensively for Erato, which released multiple discs of Schumann’s piano music. After Erato entered the Warner Classics catalog, several of those performances were reissued. On the recommendation of pianist Bruno Rigutto she began a productive affiliation with Lyrinx in the late 1980s; that label eventually issued a dozen of her albums, including Mozart’s Piano Sonatas, Intégrale inachevée (1991) and three volumes of Haydn piano sonatas.

Collard succumbed to cancer on October 10, 1993, at age 46. In 1998 the Ina label issued the anthology Les Jeunes Années, gathering performances of works by Gilbert Amy, Bach, and Schoenberg among others.