The classical music industry valorizes sweeping range, favoring artists whose programs cross centuries. But the magisterial pianist Alfred Brendel, who died on Tuesday at 94, was of the old school, focusing his long career on a small number of canonical composers from the same era: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert.
He nurtured their works with almost spiritual diligence, performing and reperforming, recording and rerecording. Scholarly and eccentric, acute in essays as well as in concert, Brendel rose from obscurity in Austria to become a best-selling, hall-filling star. His extended period under the radar perhaps contributed to his confidence in his idiosyncrasies: both his rumpled onstage manner and his fearless deployment of a sound that could be cool, even hard.
That sound was part of Brendel’s resolutely lucid approach to music. Avoiding the impression of milking scores for excess emotion, he gained a reputation for intellectual, analytical performances. Some found his playing a little dry, but others heard a kind of transcendently austere authority.
Here are a few highlights from his enormous discography.
Haydn
Brendel championed Haydn’s and Schubert’s sonatas at a time when not everyone placed those pieces at the center of the pantheon. You can hear some of his flintiness of tone in the Presto from Haydn’s Sonata in E minor, the feeling that he’s poking at the notes. But the livelier passages alternate with slightly, alluringly softened ones, for an effect of unexpected complexity in fairly straightforward music. His fast playing never seems dashed off; he is always palpably thinking. And his diamond-sharp pointedness in the opening of the sonata’s Adagio second movement eventually travels toward mysterious tenderness.
Liszt
Among Brendel’s few swerves from his core repertoire — and an important contribution to the repertoire in general — was his sustained advocacy for Liszt, a composer long dismissed by some pianists as an empty-headed showboat. This piece, from the Italy chapter of the three-part “Années de Pèlerinage,” shows off the stony touch that was characteristic of Brendel. But it also emanates a sober conviction that the music, far from being glib or merely virtuosic, is substantive enough to stand beside Beethoven.
Mozart
Charles Mackerras was on the podium and Mozart’s “Jeunehomme” Concerto on the program for Brendel’s final concert, in 2008. He and Mackerras had recorded the work a few years earlier, and it has all the refined gracefulness you could want. Listen to the gentle elegance of Brendel’s pair of trills just after 1:20 in this final movement, and the gentility with which he relaxes the music into the slower minuet section after 4:00.
Beethoven
Brendel tended not to stretch out slow movements; there is a lightness to his playing even when the mood is serious. In this middle movement of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 23, the “Appassionata,” Brendel emphasizes the music’s nobility and reserve, and its firm architecture, while letting it flow. It is an unpretentious, what-you-see-is-what-you-get interpretation. There are moments of assertiveness — he was known for the strength of his sudden loud dynamics — but also an overall sense of serenity and security.
Schubert
Brendel’s ability to convey a feeling of objectivity in his playing made his Schubert particularly memorable. He steered far from the bathos that long surrounded this composer, charting a clear course through the labyrinthine wanderings of the late sonatas. But amid the starkness, emotion is everywhere: Go to 4:25, and listen to how lonely Brendel sounds, with silence encroaching, as if the musical line is realizing its own isolation.
Zachary Woolfe is the classical music critic of The Times.
The post 5 Highlights From the Pianist Alfred Brendel’s Sprawling Career appeared first on New York Times.
