Katharina Turnbull

The pianist Katharina Wolpe, who has died aged 81, belonged to the last generation of musicians to escape from Nazi Austria and Germany in their youth and to carry with them the Austro-German interpretative tradition. Her first recital, given when she was 16 after arriving in Britain, included the Piano Sonata (1910) by Berg; the composer she identified with most from her early years onwards was Schubert.

She played the other great composers of the first Viennese school – Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven – and later, Romantic composers, notably Schumann and Brahms, with limpid tone, natural rhythm and clear phrasing. There was a sense of deep feeling, never imposed on the music, but derived from a profound understanding of its harmonic structure, polyphonic texture and form.

Her perfectly shaped, eloquent playing of the Arietta from Beethoven's last piano sonata and the way the increasingly virtuosic variations built on it sticks in the memory. So does the controlled passion and the strange, almost expressionless serenity that alternated with it in Schubert's three posthumously published piano pieces, D946.

On the way to the second Viennese school, Scriabin on the one hand and Prokofiev on the other provided perhaps surprising detours. But Schoenberg, Berg and Webern were as important in Katharina's musical world as their Viennese predecessors. She had the musical insight and technical command to make their music sound like the natural extension of the earlier classics and romantics into expressionism, and then into a constructivism that remained humanly expressive rather than experimental and cerebral. She was, for instance, one of the few pianists who could reveal the essential lyricism and continuity underlying the apparent fragmentation of Webern's Variations, Opus 27, and to make a single sonata-like structure out of the post-tonal expressivity of the first, the brooding introversion of the second and the virtuosity of the third of Schoenberg's Opus 11 piano pieces.

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Katharina 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.

Katharina was wonderful company, a warm and generous woman who will be missed by her many friends, colleagues and students.

• Katharina Wolpe, pianist, born 9 September 1931; died 9 February 2013