5 Highlights From the Pianist Alfred Brendel's Sprawling Career
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.
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