Polish-born musician known as ‘grande dame of the violin’

Ida Haendel, a Polishborn violin prodigy who became a sought-after soloist after moving to Britain, where she drew acclaim for her interpretations of concertos by Jean Sibelius and William Walton, died Wednesay at an assisted-living center in Pembroke Park, Fla. She was 96.

Her nephew Richard Grunberg said she had been hospitalized in March with respiratory problems, though he did not believe she had tested positive for the coronavirus. She was later treated for kidney cancer.

In Ms. Haendel’s telling, she was just 3 when she began performing, picking up her older sister’s violin and amazing her mother by reproducing a song that she had just heard. She went on to perform professionally for some eight decades, playing moraleboosting concerts in London during World War II before touring the world and acquiring a reputation as “the grand dame of the violin.”

“When she plays the Beethoven concerto, you can imagine Beethoven wanted it that way,” Zubin Mehta, the former conductor of the New York and Los Angeles philharmonics, told the Associated Press in 2010. “She has been a violinist for violinists.”

Ms. Haendel epitomized what Washington Post arts critic Philip Kennicott once called “a gracious yet wild style of playing,” popular in the early 20th century but now “extremely rare.” Trained by Romanian musician George Enescu and Hungarian violinist Carl Flesch, she stood completely still during recitals while dazzling audiences with works by Beethoven, Brahms, Walton and Sibelius, whose Violin Concerto became a signature piece.

After performing the concerto in Helsinki in 1949, she received a letter from the composer. “You played it masterfully in every respect,” Sibelius wrote, adding: “I congratulate myself that my concerto has found an interpreter of your rare standard.” Another admirer of her interpretation, Telegraph music critic Geoffrey Norris, wrote that she played the Sibelius concerto with “ice and fire,” resulting in a 2009 recording for Testament Records that was “simply mind-blowing.”

Critics sometimes noted that Ms. Haendel’s exuberant performance style was matched by the flamboyant outfits she wore to recitals, including an electric-magenta sheath dress, turquoise pantaloons and snakeskin vest that complemented her snakeskin purse and five-inch snakeskin heels.

Ms. Haendel was a rare female fiddler when she started out, and for much of her career remained one of the few women playing marquee concert halls.

Ms. Haendel credited her natural talent to reincarnation, saying that she must have played the violin in an earlier life. But her upbringing in a musical household surely helped as well: Her portrait-painter father played the cello and violin, while her sister played the piano and her mother sang.

She recorded for labels including Decca, which she used as the name for several of her dogs, and also led master classes and private lessons, including for German violinist David Garrett. She never married — “it was all about the music,” her nephew said — and has no immediate surviving family.

Ms. Haendel was named a commander in the Order of the British Empire in 1991 and continued performing until just a few years ago. She said she was still honing her interpretations of the concertos she had played for decades, trying to reach “that sublime quality” intended by Beethoven, Brahms or whoever else was on the program.

“I am not there to please the audience,” she told Lebrecht in 2000. “I am not an entertainer. I am there to serve the composer.”