From being possibly the most heavily promoted pianist in the closing decades of the 20th century, Brendel scarcely rates a mention now, seemingly. Why is that?
A personal rememberance about Brendel if I may. I heard Brendel play a complete set of Schubert's sonatas at the Berlin Philharmonic in 1987 and/or 1988, which was truly beautiful. Somehow the modernity of that space seemed to fit completely with Brendel's playing ideally. And Brendel's rendering of Sonata 14 D.784 has always been right at the top of my personal musical Pantheon. It so happened that this was not long before the Berlin Wall collapsed and I, doing my time of national service as a teacher at the Institut français, happened to belong to the then still standing "French Military Government of Berlin" (which I chiefly used to have free housing and cheap good food at the officers' dining room and go to East Berlin unbothered by East German guards and gorge on operas at the East Berlin Opera for a price close to zero). Now at one of the concerts there happened to be, much to my dismay, a group of French pupils on some exchange program, almost all of whom didn't give a damn about Schubert or Brendel or anything (may the teachers who had the brilliant idea to take them there roast in hell), and they were very agitated and noisy. During the intermission I took out my card of the military government, went to the teachers accompanyng the pupils and said sternly that as a member of said "Government" it was my duty to prevent the reputation of France from being unduly tarnished by such behaviours and I thus forbade them to go back in for the second part. (Of course I didn't have the slightest right to do that...) Luckily the teachers (probably much ashamed themselves) humbly acquiesced, skimmed the pupils and let just a handful of them go back in for the second part, and those were nice and quiet. Somebody must have told Brendel I had done that, because at the end of the concert he turned very clearly towards where I was seated and just nodded briefly with a smile - the most one could expect from such an even-tempered man. God, was I proud and glad that I had way exceded my (non-existing) powers that day !
Brendel was a lot more than a creation of the classical music marketplace. I went to at least a dozen of his concerts at Carnegie Hall. Most of the programs included a sonata by Beethoven or Schubert. I'm the biggest fan of his non-digital Vanguard and Phillips recordings. But there's much to enjoy in his digital Beethoven sonata traversal. Brendel may not have the same type of popularity as other pianists do because of the personality he gave off at concerts. He was all about the music and could appear somewhat remote on stage. It depends on what one's expectations are. If you're expecting Martha Argerich, Arthur Rubinstein or, to take it even further, Yuja Wang (and I love both Argerich and Rubinstein) when you listen to or went to a concert, you/were are going to be very disappointed. The funny thing about the concert aura is, if one read books by Brendel or listened to him speak, he happened to have a wonderful sense of humor which one can hear in his Haydn sonata recordings, in particular. As far reference recordings are concerned, I would put his 1970s Phillips recordings of Schubert as reference recordings, the recording of the Impromptus Opus 90 & Opus 142, above all. Recordings of Schubert weren't as common then as they are now. And I think these recordings by Schubert had a hand in that. Brendel was one of the fine pianists of the second half of the 20th century, and that happens to be because he deserves it, not due to some faux marketplace creation. His career wouldn't have lasted over half a century, and his concerts wouldn't have been as well attended as they were. I was at his farewell concert at Carnegie Hall, and it's an experience I'll never forget.
Very intelligent post. Never saw AB live. (Watched him rehearsing at the RFH - until two security guards ordered me out.) Own quite a few of his records, though. He was a damned fine Mozart and Schubert pianist. Met him in Hampstead a few years back. He was very friendly.
@@AdamCzarnowski Bolet and Brendel are my favorite pianists for Liszt. And I can't really put Liszt among my favorite composers. One of my favorite Brendel concerts was one where he played Schumann (and Liszt, I think). His performance of Schumann's Carnaval was superb. Even the non-liking Brendel friend of mine who was with me at the concert was thrilled by the performance.
I agree that Brendel was a wonderful interpreter that should not be forgotten. He certainly favored wit and intellect over showmanship. I heard his last US concert and was extremely moved by it. In my hearing, no one gets closer to the character of Beethoven than Brendel does in the middle sonatas.
i heard Brendel’s fare-well tour in Edinburgh about 15 years ago. He had wonderful charisma. I cherish the memory, and enjoy his cd’s. A wonderful musician❤️
All I can say is that his recitals on London, especially his regular June recital at the Festival Hall or Barbican, were among the highlights of my concert-going life. And as far as CDs go, I'd always choose to hear Brendel in Beethoven or Schubert before any other pianist. Those are my “reference” recordings (and yes, I have Schnabel). His followers? Any London recital was packed to capacity. He even would agree to seating on the stage, as long as not quite in his line of sight. I attended his final London recital (impressive lineup of top pianists in the audience) and the piano concert scene has never seemed quite the same without him. Someone asked him why he was leaving the stage so soon and said “You’re leaving a big hole”, to which he quipped: “Well it’s nice to be leaving something”. I believe he was also very big in Japan. So to me, he's not gone. Far from it!
I owe Brendl . Back in 71-72, was out in the South Pacific, working the copra trade of the islands on a tramp ship. I was a homesick 19 year old, starved of European culture. In a ship chandlery near Port Moresby, I discovered a box of vinyl records, new & classical in genre. One was a Vox label, Brendl playing piano transcriptions of Petroushka, Islamey, and Mussorgsky's Pictures. Luckily, I had a wee Philips battery-powered player and played that vinyl to death. I owe my sanity to Brendl. The glory of his playing and the music convinced to do something with my life rather than be sailor on a tramp.
Thank you. That's a wonderful account. The recording you mention introduced me to those works too and his bargain priced Vox recordings in general introduced my teenage self to Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart and Liszt. My guess, in answer to Dave's question, is that a lot of people played these, and the Philips ones so often, and got to know them so well, that they've become part of the mental furniture and there's nothing more to say about them. I was privileged to see him a few times and I have to admit that out of my ten greatest concert hall experiences, three of them involved Brendel. Rather than just play, he was able to make the music tell a story.
I love Brendel. I think many people just find him too cerebral in his approach. And he does have some mannerisms that come up from time to time, in particular with regard to articulation. I actually think his legacy is quite secured; and he was lucky to have great recording engineers at Philips (most of the time).
I think that fluctuations of taste in the culture are partly responsible. Yes, Brendel was a scholarly, unspontaneous, rather pedantic and stiff pianist - but he did have a real impact not just on the public, but on other musicians, and that's because he actually did in fact have an interesting artistic profile despite his limitations. He thought deeply about the music and had a very high standard; nothing got in unless it was exactly what he meant. You might hate or be bored by a Brendel performance, but you could always learn something from it (even from his failures of imagination) because it was so carefully thought out, and because the innards of the piece were so exposed - no combovers, nothing done for the sake of a pretty effect. It had substance. This will eventually lead to his work being rediscovered, I suspect. But the current moment is not one where high priests of scholarly rectitude, sober, respectable, deadly serious and entirely without any element of flash, are going to make much headway. To some extent this reaction is healthy - Earl Wild has been decriminalized! - but like all trends, it goes too far, and commerce ensures that all taste is pushed to the point of becoming bad taste.
I am an old geezer who first of all wants to thank you for rekindling in me my youthful self-trained ardor for classical music, gone dormant for recent decades until I discovered your good-humored enthusiasm for much to which I had never given much thought and your fascinating convictions that sometimes contradict my own: Haydn over Mozart?! Ever?! Well, apart from his amazing piano sonatas. So thank you for waking me back up. As for Brendel, in my earliest enthusiasm the Berkeley Public Library offered numberless borrowable Vox Boxes, the result of which is that it is Brendel’s take on numberless piano pieces that seems to me bedrock. And then one evening when we all were still quite young he gave an all-Schubert concert at the university that introduced to me the Wanderer Fantasy and the B-flat sonata with an electrifying immediacy [a “living presence”?] that I still can feel when I hear either of them, the one so full of optimism, the other so haunted by oblivion. That experience made Brendel important to me for the rest of his career. But he did seem a bit of an odd duck, an idea I’ll illustrate by a concert in Seattle in the 1990s when, during a pianissimo, some member of the audience tragically coughed, bringing the music to a halt and attracting the Basilisk gaze of the artist which I think atomized the poor cougher on the spot, after which the music could resume, and I reached for what I hoped would be a life-saving Ludens. So, in short, not at all so lovable a fellow on a stage as my greater hero, Rudolph Serkin, and therefore probably much easier in his retirement to ignore if not really to forget or reevaluate. Anyhow, my poor estimate. And I thank you again for more food for thought.
Alfred Brendel is my most played pianist still - he is amazing and unique! I read in a newspaper some time ago that he had stopped playing because he suffers from severe tinnitus. I wish him warm regards, from Graz.
I'm fascinated: The elephant at the piano in all of the comments here is all those Mozart concertos he did with Mariner and the ASMF, which have barely been mentioned. As a budding Mozart fan in the '70s they were my reference recordings, and must have been for a lot of others. So soon we forget
Yes! Along with his Schubert I think it's the best of his considerable output. The Diabellis are particularly hard to get right and Brendel really seems to grasp both their humor and their profound, spiritual depths, and getting (and rendering) both convincingly is not an easy task.
Got to hear Brendel perform solo recitals on three separate occasions in Chicago's Orchestra Hall (now called Symphony Center). The 1975 performance opened with the Bach's Italian Concerto and was followed by Beethoven's 6 Variations on F major and 32 Variations in C Minor. The program also included Liszt's Variations on the Name B.A.C.H. A great , exciting recital! In the 1he 1977 recital, Brendel played the last three Beethoven Sonatas. He got lost in Op. 109 and had to jump some pages (I think that it was in the final movement where this mishap occurred). But this notwithstanding, an otherwise excellent performance. In 2002 I heard him perform Mozart's A major Sonata and Beethoven's Op. 22 Sonata in B flat. I loved it! What's not to love about Brendel's pianism? I always thought he was great and bought the big Decca/Philips box when it came out a few years back. Still think that Brendel performed the best Liszt A Major Concerto (# 2) I've ever heard (better even than Richter) and his Totentanz is also the best I've ever heard. And just think that Brendel's Schubert and Mozart are, in general, fabulous. So what's not to love about Brendel's playing? I hold him right up there with Ashkenazy and Pollini as one of the greatest pianists of the later 20th Century.
Brendel first got me into the late Beethoven sonatas as well as late Schubert. Around the time he stopped performing I was also lucky enough to attend one of his lectures. It was on the subject of the Beethoven sonatas and he had structured his talk around short sections he compared to the four elements: reciting passages where the music flowed like water, floated like air, became solid or else burst in fire. It was a fun idea that is very far from the more familiar kinds of academic musicology. Overall, I've always felt that he played the works of both composers (Beethoven and Schubert) with a very sympathetic ear, doing his utmost to honour their musical and emotional intentions above and beyond imposing too much of his own personality. And I think he totally gets Beethoven's quirkiness and humour more than most pianists. What some might see as Brendel's stuffiness is certainly a facade.
He's 93 and does get about! Bumped into him last Sunday at the Wigmore Hall for his beloved Paul Lewis recital (Schubert's last 3 sonatas). His repertoire was somewhat limited, and even the Schoenberg Concerto has a double Brendel recording (Kubelik and Gielen) - quite beautiful, however.
Thank you for making this video! Although I have been collecting classical CDs for more than thirty years, at the time I watched this video about two weeks ago, I had never really listened to Alfred Brendel. I'm not sure why; he was certainly discussed by critics I read, but the reviews never made him sound like a top choice for me. And I guess he didn't get much radio play on the stations I listened to. So, I decided it was high time to give Brendel a listen. I saw some comments on this video praising his Schubert so I found a performance of the Wanderer Fantasy on TH-cam. I didn't expect to be blown away as I already have recordings by Richter and Rubenstein which tend to be top choices of critics. The performance astonished me. Brendel shot straight to the top of the list of my favorite performances of the piece. I hopped onto Amazon and ordered his set of late Schubert Sonatas (including the Wanderer Fantasy, Impromptus and a couple of other things). I got his 1980s digital set simply because it was much more affordable than the earlier analog and most people say his interpretations haven't changed much throughout the years. The box arrived a couple of days ago and I've been listening, first to the Wanderer Fantasy then some of the sonatas. (I haven't gotten to the last three yet.) It's like hearing these works for the first time. Brendel seems to dig deep into the music and finds many treasures therein. His combination of superb technique, phenomenal intelligence, and deep humanity are unmatched in this music. His approach is completely unsentimental and unmannered but he can bring out Schubert's melodic lines and shifting moods like no one else I've heard. I just ordered his Mozart Concerto recordings with Marriner and I look forward to their arrival. So, THANK YOU again for this and all your videos and your constant advice to "keep on listening!"
My introduction to Beethoven’s late piano sonatas is a Phillips Brendel recording. I have since added Pollini Wilhelm Kempff and an Australian pianist Gerard Willems versions but I still cherish Brendel’s rendition. Something poetic and warm in his delivery that touched me deeply.
When I was on vacation in Romania in 2016, I was in the airport ready to head outside after getting my luggage. There was a man in a suit standing there with a sign that said "Alfred Brendel". I tried to stall for time so I could meet him. But because I had friends waiting outside to pick me up, I couldn't wait too long. A few days later, I discovered the Enescu Festival was going on, then I realized he was there for that. But at that time, he was already retired from playing and was only doing a lecture. Which was exactly what he said he would do. I was there for a concert, so I passed on his lecture and bought tickets to see Daniel Barenboim instead. I own that Brendel Box and I really enjoy it. I firmly believe his early works are his best. It has a nice, fresh take on the works, as compared to his later remakes. In my opinion anyway. I know that his public perception isn't the same as the other greats, but that has no effect on me. People will listen to who they like. But yes, it is a pity that his work isn't spoken with the same praise as his contemporaries. But yes, once he passes, I'm certain he will be re-evaluated.
In the late 70s I heard him play the last three Schubert sonatas. He took a few measures to adjust his pedaling to the (wonderful) acoustics of Jordan hall at New England Conservatory. After that it was flawless and one of the most memorable recitals of my life. Then I heard him a year or two before he retired, and I couldn't believe the insensitive pounding throughout the program. It turned out his hearing was going and he didn't realize it. Someone should have told him sooner. His "Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts " is wonderful, as is his masterclass on the Liszt Sonata (available on TH-cam).
He came out of a pack of journeyman middle European pianists of the '50s, any of whom were as good as he was--Klien, Demus, Badura-Skoda, Frankl. But fate somehow smiled upon him, and he became a star of the 70s and 80s. I tend to like his Vox and Vanguard early work far more than what came when he was in the spotlight. He deserves credit for allowing a whole generation of young music lovers to discover lots of great piano music on the cheap. Later on, IMO his Philips work was more mannered and reticent, and therefore less interesting. I'm happy to own the Brilliant set Dave was holding, but very little of the Philips stuff. I interviewed Brendel a couple of times and remember those occasions very fondly. A charming, witty man.
What you talk about at the end, about Brendel being a product of the classical music marketplace rather than the enthusiasm of listeners, is, I think, at the core of why he isn't mentioned much in discussions of reference (or "best") recordings. As you've said before, listeners are often smarter and more perceptive than musical marketers give them credit for, and a pianist like Arrau always had more going for him in terms of tone, technique, and interpretative depth. Brendel was a fine pianist, but I think many (including myself) were always skeptical of how much he was promoted, and intuitively knew that the promotional machine behind him outstripped his (still considerable) talents. I've still listened to a lot of Brendel, and if anything I appreciate his consistency and the fact that he DID have an interpretative vision... but at the same time he gives me comparatively few "Wow" moments compared to pianists like Arrau, Richter, Rubinstein, Argerich, Horowitz, or, even in modern times, Hamelin or Wang. I do, however, really, really like him in Schubert and Haydn. In a way he often reminds me of Wilhelm Kempff; a very sensitive, nuanced pianist that rarely went for bold flash, and that works really well for a composer like Schubert where the more you hold back, the more emotional depth seems to come out of his work. I also think he's one of the few pianists to really get Beethoven's Diabelli Variations.
Why aren't we talking about Brendel? I don't know. But there are a number of other pianists who made many fine recordings, almost always positively reviewed, that don't get discussed much and are unlikely to get your "reference" imprimatur. A few examples: Robert Casadesus, Richard Goode, Ivan Moravec, Gary Graffman, Emmanuel Ax.
An excellent point. It’s not as if the standard piano solo or piano with orchestra rep is lacking for fine recording artists. Manny Ax performs up here in Wisconsin with the Madison Symphony regularly and he’s never anything less than magnificent. I don’t know Brendel’s work well at all, but maybe cool, analytical literalism has had its day and neo-Romanticism is back in vogue.
I heard Brendel several times in the late Seventies and early Eighties, when he would have been in his prime. One concert featured the Schumann Piano Concerto with Claudio Abbado and the LSO. I can't remember ever hearing anything quite so dull and unimaginative. I have never understood why he had such a high profile (and I have heard many of his recordings.) To be fair some of his early recordings on Vox weren't bad and had a freshness and spontaneity that were often lacking later in his career. However, his reputation rests largely on the later recordings with Phillips. Marketing must have played a large part. (Brendel instead of Arrau????) He was IMO very overrated.
@@tarakb7606 Whereas at my first Prom I heard him play Beethoven 1 and it was absolutely brilliant. He got something like 7 curtain calls but didn't do an encore! But I would listen to Brendel for Mozart or Beethoven, not so much Schumann.
I never heard him playing Schumann live. Apparently it's not his standard repertoire. But go and listen his Beethoven Concerto, Schubert Sonata, Haydn and Mozart. That's his universe. can not blame you, it sounds like your knowledge of Brendel is extremely lacking @@tarakb7606
Brendel is such a great pianist. I like his versions of the Beethoven sonatas - he played them as they were written, without unnecessary inflections and he never adds over rubato. Just touches were needed. He also doesn’t play TOO FAST like many others I’ve heard where they RUIN the music. I met Brendel in Melbourne Australia in the early 70s. Great man!
If you haven't, please do a spot like this one on Rudolf Serkin. I am loving your perspectives on the 20th century luminaries of classical music. Many of them were my idols back in the 70s when I was a music student myself.
Brendel did a very fine Schoenberg piano concerto with the SWF Symphony Orchestra, Baden-Baden, conducted by Michael Gielen, which is pretty much MY reference recording for the piece... so many performers forget that Schoenberg was the cat behind VERKLARTE NACHT, and they go at his 12 tone pieces like they were playing Bartok or Antheil. Brendel and Gielen bring out the romanticism in the Piano Concerto instead of making it a hammerfest.
My first Brendel recording, and my first Schoenberg recording, was this very performance of the Piano Concerto. It's from early in his career. I always wondered why he didn't play the concerto because it fit with the German Romantics that were the core of his repertoire, just as Uchida has done
I see that you do not like his Haydn, but his four CD\LP set of the sonatas was a landmark in Haydn sonata discography and only after this music started to get the attention it deserved in many ways a "reference recording" for this music if ever there was one. And the Mozart\ Marriner set is as classic as the Anda or Perahia sets, whether we consider it "reference" recording or not. His "mature" Schubert piano music set ( which he did twice for Philips) was also a major event because until then pianists tended to play only the D. 960. He was a major figure in the acceptance of sonatas nos. 16-19 to the major repertoire.
I had my Schubert served by the likes of Pollini and Lupu, and only afterwards learned that Brendel's was supposedly the reference. After listening the sonatas, I found him dry and safe. Reference I trust he is not. Btw, if you don't mind such imposition: please make a video on the late Pollini, I would enjoy that. Thanks
I can only say that if I had not listened to Alfred Brendel's recordings of Beethoven's Bagatelles op126; or Liszt Sonata; or, Mozarts Double Piano Concerto (also featuring the wonderful Walter Klien)...(All on Vox), my life would have been immeasurable the poorer. So, whatever his current reputation may (or, may not) be, this can never diminish the very special admiration that I, personally have always felt for him even when some of his performances may have failed to reach the same level of greatness.
I love Brendel. He’s my go-to pianist when it comes to Beethoven. I find his performances very powerful and dramatic. Dave has a point, though, that he hurt himself by recording four sonata cycles. The performances are bound to be compared against each other which can’t be good for any of them.
When you spoke of him in a postmortem way, I had to check--because Brendel has been my reference for many things for decades; his Vox of the late Beethoven sonatas was my introduction to those works--because I actually think about Brendel now and then, and a few months ago I checked to see if he was still around and he was, and when I checked just now it appears he still is, alive if not kicking at 93.
Brendel's popularity in UK has not waned from what I can tell. His interpretations of the classics are always spoken of with reverence and still come out top in BBC 'Building a library'. My personal favourites are his Haydn, his Mozart Sonatas and the concertos with the great Sir Charles Mackerras and the SCO. I have a recording taken from the BBC of a performance of Schubert A major from Snape that I've always seen as the reference recording in my head. And his 80s impromptus are magical and spontaneous in ways that other artists don't seem to match. Some of his Liszt is superb especially his Late Liszt disc though the sonata recordings from the 80s does nothing for me.
As someone who encountered Brendel's work first in fhe 1960's, I can tell you he was no mere creation of record labels. Then, the number of concerts in NY and elsewhere promoted him widely and his audience was enthusiastic. I think his relative absence from CDs stems from the fact that he recorded everything so many times that it was difficult to decide who was the "real" Brendel. He was a deeply thoughtful artist who has studied music all his life, and his interpreations, his "quirks" (as you ungenerously called them) are the results. That is perhaps the more interesting question relating to why his sad absence from today's scene came about.
Here is one recording of his that I think is the best: his Philips Duo set of the Schubert Impromptus and Moments Musicaux. As much as I love Schiff, Curzon, and others, his renditions of these Schubert pieces are my favorites.
What may not be considered - he did many things in Germanic repertoire well consistently, but what was truly great? It could be why he was well liked and respected. But some artists create a splash because they perform certain works so well - for example Richter in the Appassionata and Hammerklavier (Royal Festival Hall) or certain Schubert (and Richter had some Schubert that is very questionalble). Solomon left some superb performances in Beethoven sonatas. For all the talk about Brendel's Schubert, Lupu performed publicly the last Schubert Sonata that wowed audiences in major cities across the globe. Arrau certainly has his fans and certainly had a record label behind him, but it will be curious which works you think Arrau delivered the type of performance Richter did in the Appassionata or Rubinstein in the Brahms Piano Sonata No. 3 or Michelangeli in the Brahms Ballades, all works deep in the German piano repertoire. But perhaps some of Brendel's best performances come in works that are not of the romantic era, his Haydn is quite good. Too bad Haydn is not so popular and Mozart, which launched Uchida, is. Personally, I saw Brendel and thought he was a very fine pianist and deserving of a big reputation. Not everyone need have hit the home run, just providing something very, very good consistently should be respected.
Good question and, for those of us who admire him enormously, rather troubling. The two Philips Beethoven cycles back-to-back confused people; I think maybe it had something to do with the lukewarm critical reception for the first (i.e. second overall). The Penguin Guide gave it a brief but memorable kicking, saying it didn't match Brendel's live Beethoven, and for that reason he included live performances in the third cycle. He himself recognises that the studio performances publicised by Philips so heavily weren't always his best, and it was only in later years that stunning live readings of the Diabellis and late Beethoven sonatas became easy to find. It didn't help that everyone including publicists and commissioning editors found him so intimidating, though he can be very witty and his mocking of period-performance mannerisms is as savage as yours, Dave. Personally I'd choose some of his recordings as Desert Island discs, but there's no getting away from the fact that his repertoire was more heavily weighted to the Austro-German classics than any modern pianist I can think of. Think of all the composers he barely or never touched: Bach (one great disc), Chopin (a tiny proportion), Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Ravel, Rachmaninov (one of his pet hates) and Prokofiev (he disowned his early recordings of the Fifth Concerto). But, to put it another way, he knew his limitations, including the limitations of some of studio recordings of his beloved classics that he did try to displace with remarkable live performances.
I first became aware of Alfred Brendel when I came to Boston in 1969 to study with the great pianist and teacher Katja Andy who came from a musical German family whose mother studied with Clara Schumann, talk about a connection to the 19th century. Around Miss Andy, as she was known, were a group of pianist who grew out of a shared association with Edwin Fischer including, but not limited to Alfred Brendel, Paul Badura Skoda, Veronica Jochum, Greta Sultan, Agi Jambor, Evelyn Crochet and later on Russell Sherman and Lois Shapiro. None of this group were exactly her students; she was the senor advisor of the group who shared an intense commitment in their music making that made them more musicians than performers. When she was happy with a performance Miss Andy would say, among other things, that it was "expository" which I took to mean that it exposed something deep about the music. She did value warmth and what she called being "musical". I heard most of these artist at one time or another and there was a shared depth in their music making that separated them from other pianists I heard. I remember Miss Andy saying she had difficulty enjoying hearing Vladimir Horowitiz. She also told me she regarded Rosina Lhevinne as a "great figure" but stopped sort of saying she was a great musician. I heard Brendel many times and there was an intensity that set him apart. The halls were always full of appreciative admirers though one got the feeling they were not exactly the people who would come out for other pianists of that generation. I left my musical education behind years ago much to the relief of Miss Andy; I was not talented but she and this group left an enormous impression on my musical tastes. I don't think Brendel is forgotten. He was never a crowd pleaser, always at the service of the music which required devoted concentration from himself and his audience. The rewards are many but his performances are intense on both sides.
Thanks for raising this point about Alfred Brendel and his reception amongst today's listeners. I agree that Brendel seems more popular within the recording industry than with consumers, but this might be less about the quality of his playing and more about the market itself. Perhaps being able to have a wide repertoire and play it pretty well, but never really with the kind of individuality or originality (as say Gould or Schnabel, to take extreme examples), makes for good sales but not memorable recordings. Heard live, this may be a different story, as Brendel is a great artist without question, but he may have been a product of the industry at the time, cultivated for sales, with nothing too eccentric or controversial, and pitched for consumption. He is eminently listenable, and that may be his greatest shortcoming (?)
I take advantage of this opportunity to share what was for me a learning experience: I have many recordings from Brendel (among them also the piano concertos with Levine and with Rattle). I was never impressed by his sound (his recorded sound). However, very different was the impression I had attending one of his performances in Hamburg. It was a great surprise for me, since the marvelous sound he projected was quite different than the sound I had in mind from his recordings. Since then I am more cautious regarding recordings: as good and convenient as they are, they cannot tell us the "whole story" of an artist.
I agree. There is no contradiction in the statements. For whatever reason, the recorded sound did not capture the richness of the sound produced during the concert. I did not have the privilege to attend a concert by Arrau, but I prefer his recordings to the ones of Brendel (both being from the same label). Arrau's voicing of the cords, his sound, is superb and was very well captured.
A recording of Alfred Brendel playing Schubert's sonata in A minor was one of the early classical CDs I bought when I was in my 20"s and and the format was new. It was among the recordings that greatly increased my fondness of classical music. The recordings that you buy early in your listening history may not necessarily be the very best available but I don't think that matters so much if they increase your appreciation of the art form. In fact that would be an interesting topic for a Dave Hurwitz video: recordings I once loved that now I revile. Please consider it, Dave!
I always got the impression that Alfred Brendel (more than other folks) saw himself not just as a musician/pianist, but also as some kind of public intellectual concerning all kinds things related to music. I always got the impression that he wanted to be seen as a terribly smart guy. Some people prefer to let the music speak for itself. Others like to also comment and elaborate on the pieces, the composer, their approach to music making, etc. Which some listeners may find interesting and stimulating, while others may find it rather irritating. This could be part of the answer to your. But just as well i could be completely on the wrong track.
Trivial, I know, but perhaps one of the reasons for Brendel's appeal to the marketplace was that he looked good on a record cover - and he aged well. He had just that kind of professorial, slightly impish, old-school look, with the scholarly glasses and the tousled hair (unlike Arrau, who looked like a stern Germanic headmaster) that encouraged confidence in his interpretation...
I think Brenden has a lot of fans. Even among the regular commenters here. I like him a lot. He brings out harmonies in chords so deliciously. And his Beethoven last three sonatas reach a depth for me that other pianists don’t quite get to. My humble opinion of course. I might be courting backlash here, but I wonder if the commenters just might not be brown nosing you. We all know you don’t often promote his recordings in the repertoire series. And we all know you love Arrau. You are an authority figure of sorts and it might be that unconsciously, we just want you to like us as much as we like you. 🤷 So we don’t mention Brendel. But we mention Arrau in the hopes that you give a positive reply. Hope I’m not offending anyone but I think there is a psychological phenomenon happening here. 😅
@@DavesClassicalGuide True. One of the qualities I admire about you is that you are fair. Even with Rattle you rate his Szymanowski. Personally I don’t like Brendel’s Liszt though 😅
I worked for Tower Records mail order department in the early to mid 1990s. I always appreciated his Vox Beethoven sonata cycle, which was dirt cheap and a great choice for the budget minded customer. Some of his recordings have aged better than others, but in my opinion the Mozart piano concertos he did near the end of his career, with Mackerras conducting, are marvelous.
They absolutely are! As a fellow Towerian, working a classical section, I had been a bit oversaturated and perhaps jaded. Other pianists were my heroes. But whenever I did hear him live, it was very good. Not great as in overwhelming, but special. One had to listen, and he made one listen. His quality wasn't always an overt one. But it also, definitively, wasn't 'Emperor's Cloths'.
During my years as a piano student, right before Music College, Brendel was my favourite pianist alongside Rubinstein. As the time passed by, I still kept liking him, but there was a certain disenchantment. He used to be to me like the "perfect" interpreter, the most loyal, most analytical, etc. I found out later that all this was more a critic's and teacher's propaganda. When I finally was able to get into some more difficult and interesting repertoire I discovered that the score and the composers leave a lot of space for "interpretation" and that those supposed most analytical players, many times add their own stuff: from ornamentation to changes in the articulations, dynamics and tempi that were not there in the score, AT ALL!!! And to my surprise that was also the case with Brendel. When I started working on Schumann's opus 17, I found out that Kempff and Arrau were way more in consonance with the score than Brendel was. I still love Brendel's approach and "vibe", BUT I see now that much of that image was marketing. The "super intelectual and analytic piano player" above the mere virtuosistic and "dumb" kinds that always go along and change stuff in the heat of the moment because they have no respect for the composer and just want to show off. Now I see that the then so called "dumb" velocists were not so dumb at all and that the super intelectuals were not right all the time, they also make "doubtful" decisions. Anyhow, I still love Brendel BUT I'm discovering so much of pianists I then refused to hear more often, names like Gulda, Cziffra and Argerich, and some that were out of my radar like Ciccolini and Samson François.
I read in an interview with him that he felt that part of his success was due to the fact that he could be absolutely consistent from take to take which made life much easier for the engineers for comping takes together. Maybe that's one of the reasons Philips liked him so much: maybe from the point of view of studio time he was fast and accurate and so relatively cheap to record. I suspect this is the kind of thing that figures highly in record label management meetings. Brian Eno has the saying "turn your flaws into secret strengths," I wonder if in this case a strength was a secret flaw? Maybe it's perceived that his playing is controlled, studied, indeed reproducible but not spontaneous. Is that fair? I don't know. I've only heard his Schubert piano sonatas which I liked. (There's a good homework assignment: I should listen to more recordings of the Schubert piano sonatas)
Brendel was my first Beethoven sonata cycle, and I ended up never listening to it very much. I had the Ashkenazy 2-disc set of named sonatas that I preferred, and then I started collecting the digital Kovacevich. Brendel’s Pathétique came on our local classical station recently and my wife commented on how light and soft and lovely it was. Which of course, in the outer movements, is exactly what the Pathétique shouldn’t be. I heard his Appassionata about a week later and now I don’t remember my opinion of it, which in itself is telling.
Brendel retired while he was ahead, and not trotted out for self-humiliation like the late great Pollini. He struck me like a school master-like artist, always correct and proper, without the outward flair of some of his contemporaries. Loved his Liszt and Schubert, and occasionally sampled his early stuff on Vox - Mussorgsky's Pictures, Stravinsky's Petrushka and Balakirev Islamey - just for the fun of it (Guess the pianist!) My all-time favourite disc of was his Recital for the benefit of Amnesty International - with Liszt's Funerailles, Berg's Sonata and Busoni's Toccata. The earlier cassette also had Liszt's Sposalizio and something else I can't remember. Dave is right, he ought to be remembered.
Let’s start with those adorable portraits on the Phillips Beethoven cycle. Those big horn rimmed glasses and a look of surprise. In the seventies this image was unusual and arresting. It really stood out. So I had to have one of them (pathetique) at home. That’s the first thing that springs to mind when I see the re issues. A fine argument for the original artwork which hasn’t been seen since.
I first discovered Brendel when I heard his Schubert Impromptus decades ago and have loved his interpretation of them since. There is a delightful TH-cam video of his mentoring of Kit Armstrong that does not concentrate on the music, but rather Brendel's life in the delightfully named village of Plush in Dorset. A charming film that gives some insight to the man and his life in Dorset. The video is - Set the Piano Stool on Fire - sadly it's been moved behind a paywall now
Interesting that Brendel's star seems to have faded a bit. I suspect he belongs to the class of musicians who are "more respected than loved." Though I don't consider myself a fan, I do admire Brendel's musicianship. He was fundamentally a classicist and one whose musical priorities were intellectual rather than sensual. And that's why I am particularly impressed by his Liszt. His Phillips recordings of that composer were the first to alert me to the fact that there is more to Liszt's piano works than flashy virtuosity. To my ears, Brendel's interpretations of his chosen repertoire became more cerebral as he aged, and that's why I tend to favor his earliest efforts for Vox and Vanguard. His recording of Mozart's two-piano works with Klien is for me a "reference recording." It may seem odd to compare him with Gould, but there are some striking similarities. Both were intellectualists rather than sensualists, and both cultivated a dry tone and pointillistic touch that were consciously anti-"pianistic." Their Haydn performances are quirky in very similar ways.
I'm honestly quite surprised about this video. I consider his Schubert as the best one on record, specially the late sonatas and the Impromptus. He was probably the most intellectual and insightful pianist of his his generation. His explanations about Liszt's Années are wonderful (I prefer them to his interpretation), as well as his books of essays and interviews. He could be also nasty and maybe pedantic in his remarks. For example, he said that Rachmaninov, Puccini and Léhar form a Bermuda triangle in music and that the works of Rachmaninov don't deserve the consideration that they get!
Brendel was a very fine pianist, with a delicate touch and a sure sense of musicianship. I personally don't think he had the "muscle" for Beethoven or Brahms, but his Haydn Sonatas, Mozart Concerti, and even Schubert Sonatas, I've always found quite lovely. But then....there always were the flashy pianists who always got the hype from the media. Brendel was a fine musician and I've enjoyed many of his recordings.
7:20 I never thought of Brendel's Haydn as strange, at least not as strange as Gould's! I first got to know and love Haydn's sonatas after buying a recording by Brendel. Later, I bought a box played by Gould. I gave the latter to a friend, who didn't like Haydn, but liked what Gould did with/to him.
I discovered Brendel in the late-1970s with his Philips LP of the Schubert Wanderer Fantasy and the D960 Sonata, also my introduction to both works. I agree that a bit of the purity of those Schubert recordings dissipated when he redid them all for digital. But I bought the complete Brendel-Schubert set when Philips, oops, Decca brought them out on CD and play them often. Pollini is showier and just as fine technically, of course, but I feel that the composer himself speaks in Brendel's playing. Miraculous.
I like Alfred Brendel’s interpretation of Schubert Piano Sonata’s and I remember going to the Albert Hall in the early 70’s to hear him play a Beethoven Piano Concerto as part of the BBC Proms which was excellent. My favourite recording of Beethoven’s Emperor concerto is Claudio Arrau with the Staatskapelle Dresden conducted by Sir Colin Davis.
I agree completely about that Arrau/Davis/Dresden Emperor Concerto! Not only an amazing performance but in terms of recording, one of the best sounding CDs I've ever heard!
I've certainly noticed the "everyone pays attention when someone dies" phenomena. British publications (such as The Strad) seem to just LOVE this, incessantly pointing out the death of people they almost certainly never so much as mentioned the existence of while they were alive. ("So-and-so was most known as being a back-chair second violinist with an orchestra you've never heard of. He was 91 and retired from playing and teaching 25 years ago. But his death is, apparently, notable enough to bump coverage of actual living musicians for.")
I remember reading an article on Earl Wild, a gossipy sort of interview, in which Wild groused about "...the Brendelization of piano playing." I got a chuckle out of that line.
It's interesting you mention Arrau. Both Brendel and Arrau recorded a lot of Beethoven, but that left little room for other repertoire. Arrau excelled in his very few recordings of Spanish music (Albeniz, Granados) and Brendel has spoken of his admiration for the Chopin Preludes, which he never recorded.
I don't consider myself to be widely versed or sophisticated about pianists, though I've probably heard most of the big names at least one time. I love Brendel's TH-cam recordings of the late Schubert sonatas, especially the last (and IMO best) one. It's the only version I've heard that doesn't take the first movement too slow. He introduced me to those sonatas, on TH-cam, and for that I'm extremely grateful.
He was a straight-as-an-arrow do exactly as the composer says type, probably a little too safe at times. I've heard people say his recordings lack a point of difference. His Schubert stuff is first-rate though
I was born in 1992 for context- by the time I was a teenager Brandel and Pollini represented the extreme version of post-war non-romantic pianism. Both also took themselves SO seriously- or at least were marketed as such. So when I was growing us, they were already out of fashion. Certainly a rich pallete of colors and attention to nuance of sound are usually missing in Brendel's playing. You would think at least his sense of structure and style would be impressive, but I listened yesterday to his reccording of the Rondo of Op. 2 No. 2, which sounded uneven and heavy handed. My reference for the Bethoven sonatas are Kempff, Schiff and Goode. I never heard a Brendel performance which I prefered to either of those. If you haven't read it, the Rosen vs. Brendel op. 110 debate is great, and Rosen wins with a knockout. All that being said, Brendel is a good teacher and tremendous promoter of young talents, so bravo to him for that!
For me Brendel is still the first choice in Schubert. I don't like his Mozart, Beethoven or Haydn. But his Schubert is superb in bringing out harmony and seconary melodies and motives...
I first became aware of Brendel in the late 60's because of my piano teacher's enthusiasm for his playing. I don't think Brendel as yet had played in the US (I could be wrong, of course) but I do know it was only later that his reputation in America had grown exponentially. I heard him play the "Tempest Sonata" here in Vienna in 1973 at the Musikverein, and I approached him after the concert to tell him how much I enjoyed his Vox recordings of the Beethoven Piano Concertos (from the 60's), to which he grinned and replied, "I'm about to re-record them"! (which I think he did at least 3 or 4 times more). Funny, though that no one has mentioned that the reason he retired was that he developed arthritis in both hands which made playing such works as the "Hammerklavier" Sonata too painful.
FWIW, I like Brendal's stuff a lot (the Beethoven concerto set with Chicago and that person, the late Schubert Sonatas, the Mozart Concertos, a live performance of the Liszt Sonata I heard at the Kennedy Center, etc.), but in no music is he my personal favorite. I wonder if this is a common view, and provides the answer to your question.
I agree he was best in his vox period. His schubert moments musicaux/three pieces on vox is wonderful. I really also like his duet work with Walter Klein on vox.
There's an interesting recording of him playing two concertos at Bruno Maderna's final concert - Bartok 1 and the Schoenberg. I love Brendel's Liszt - he consistently displays a great sense of narrative and drama in the larger pieces like the Norma Fantasie, the Benediction and the Sonata. But his Philips recording of Sposalizio (Annees 2) and Vox Paganini Etudes are also well worth hearing. His book pointed me to several important historical recordings including Edwin Fischer's Mozart Fantasia K 475 from 1941, now remastered on APR. I agree that his early Vox Mozart Piano Concertos and his late ones with Mackerras are full of magnificent playing. He recorded Mozart Ch'Io Mi Scordi Di Te...Non Temer, Amato Bene, K 505 with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in 1968 - wonderful stuff, and I highly recommend his playing on the "In Portrait" DVD.
He definitely exists for me! I had the pleasure to experience Brendel 1993 in Salzburg with the Vienna Philharmonic under Frans Brüggen; Mozarts piano concerto No.20 and Beethovens piano concerto No.3 unforgettable!! He is is one of just a few pianists I listen regularly on records, especially Mozart, Schubert and Liszt...
I totally agree. Listening to Brendel felt like eating your vegetables. You had the feeling it was good for you but it wasn't as much fun as it might be. However, I remember listening to a a Philips two for of Mozart Piano Concertos and being surprised that it was him who was playing on it. I think if we can get away from the persona and just listen to the music there may be some really good things there. However, he's never going to be exactly exciting.
Alfred Brendel was my entry into classical music. I heard his Schubert D960 in a record store in 1987 just as CD was becoming dominant, and I had to have it. Since all Polygram mid-price CDs were on sale @ 3 for $25, I also bought his disc of Mozart PCs 23 and 27 and HVK's 1970s Beethoven 9. Eventually I bought his Mozart PC box set, some of his Mozart Piano Sonatas, his Schubert and Beethoven piano box sets. I always liked Brendel.
I heard play Brendel 4 Schubert Recitals in 1988 in Frankfurt and it was in most parts a very idiomatic Schubert playing to remember - with a fine balance of melancholy, viennese rythms and brisk tempos. He had to play differently than other great pianists because his technique was not allowing the russian repertoire nor romantic etudes. But for example the Brahms concertos got very good playing by him - by contrast his Mozart sonatas were not comparable to those of Gulda or later Uchida. My parenta generation (now in the 80ties and 90ties) love him nevertheless very much.
After receiving initial wet-nursing by Ingrid Haebler (Schubert and Schumann) who inspired me to try and do my best at playing the piano myself, Brendel waltzed into my early teens with his Schubert and (analogue) Beethoven. Both were on Philips, and that may have had something to do with the fact that my father, being a Philips employee, could buy those records with a substantial discount. Now when I turned 14 or so, I had requested the Beethoven concertos box with Brendel and Haitink as a (granted, rather expensive) birthday gift. But my father thought I could make do with a 'mixed' cycle on three seperate LP's by three different pianists, all on budget reissues which were then extremely cheap in the so-called "Philips Personeelswinkel". Although I did not not know any of the pianists on offer I was very disappointed at not getting the Brendel box, that also had much better looks I thought. The box, not the man, I should add. So, after some really unforgivable behaviour on my part and some assistance from my mother who always thought of ways to get may father to spoil us kids rotten, he duly went back to the Philips Personeelswinkel and exchanged the seperate albums for the Brendel box. Although I now regret being such a spoiled brat at that time I have never ever regretted getting that Beethoven concertos box. I have really worn out those records. They were magical to me. Of course that also has a lot to do with the greatness of one Ludwig van Beethoven... So there you have my personal Brendel anecdote. Brendel is/was a great pianist. His analogue Schubert sonatas held me spellbound and I even loved his digital remakes, although they weren't perhaps really necessary. Someone mentioned his Haydn being humorous and I couldn't agree more. Brendel really did a great job making me reassess Haydn's stature as a composer. Before that I had thought of Haydn as Mozart's "moronic nephew" (perhaps someone knows a better translation of this very Dutch expression?) but now I know better! And oh, his KV 310! It was Brendels recording that made me desperately want to play this sonata myself! (That took a lot of practice!). Should I go on?
If there is a reason, it might be that in Brendel's core repertoire -Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, it is a field crowded with outstanding players and recordings - I have some individual recordings of his Schubert and Beethoven sonatas, but complete box sets of the Schubert works by Kempff and Uchida in the former, and Barenboim and Rudolf Buchbinder in the latter case -but they are all good, so how would Brendel be elevated above the rest?
His flinty, modern, intellectual sound was good for futurist late Liszt. And that's probably where he is still right up there for me. His Haydn is also very good because i think he identified greatly with Papa's quirky sense of humor. Otherwise, Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart just had way too much competition.
I didn't get seriously into Beethoven until my father bought Brendel's complete Beethoven piano works on 21 albums from Murray Hill in the 60s, so I owe him a debt of gratitude. I never saw him live, unfortunately. Something I have said frequently for years is that Lang Lang should be chained in Brendel's basement for a year until he learns proper playing style.
I was in high school when Brendel was recording for Vox nd critics were loudly touting him as an "underdog" talent who deserved a better label. Then when he was promoted to Philips he kind of disappeared. Having done their job, critics moved on, I guess.
Brendel is my go-to for the Beethoven sonatas - with the one exception of Richter's studio Appassionata. I also remember his debut LP for Vox - Islamey, Petrouchka Suite, and Pictures at an Exhibition. SRSLY.
As noted in other comments, I was starting my collection about the time that Phillips was promoting Brendel. So, he was my introduction to the Schubert sonatas, Liszt and a few other composers. What happened was Arrau and Ashkenazy. It snowballed from there--de Larrocha for Mozart, Schiff for Schubert. So many great pianist to choose from, and it seemed there was always someone I liked better than Brendel.
Alfred Brendel is a Toyota Camry. A great all rounder that will safely take you from A to B every time, but not one that will top any list of individual characteristics. He might be considered a reference pianist (maybe) but not a pianist of a reference recording.
There are two areas where I think he is almost unsurpassed (I say "almost" because I do not know every recording ever made of anything, unlike some people I could mention!) and those are the Mozart concertos with Marriner (very honourable mention indeed to Perahia) and the Schubert sonata set. The one from the 70s on Philips, remastered by Eloquence into a set that is perfection to my ears, with the one tiny drawback in that he was adamant that first movement exposition repeats should be ignored. Other will think that is a plus. After the 70s, he started plaing like a professor: - Did you notice how I did this? - See how I make that point? It became mannered in its insistence on being didactic, agogic. This is why I prefer his Vox Beethoven piano cycle over all the later ones as well. It was natural. It just worked. It let the music speak. All that became less and less as his career progressed. He remained one of the great pianists - no question - but once the 80s had arrived, he was no longer much to my taste. BUT HE PLAYED THE WEBER CONCERT PIECE FREQUENTLY! That should count for something! I have not delved into his Liszt, for the bad reason that I expected it to be not for me. I admit freely that that's not right. Then again, I do not need much Liszt in my life, and Arrau is all I want.
During a dinner party at our home a number of years ago, a friend who happens to be an active, classical pianist came out of our listening room and remarked on the number of Brendel recordings we had. "He's a cold s.o.b.," our pal said, "Both in his tone and in his person." We had become accustomed to his critiques of pianists we loved--e.g., Uchida was "a real snob," etc. So, I'm not sure that Brendel excited a lot of respect and/or admiration from his peers. We continue to listen to his Schumann and Beethoven because of the fierce intelligence he brought to the work.
Given your estimation of his sound as flinty, unalluring etc., which I don't disagree with, the question is not why is Brendel currently unappreciated but why he was ever Phillips' It guy in this music in the first place?
I think you are right that any artist who re-records the same repertoire in similar performances will struggle to make reference recordings. This also besets Karajan. Beyond that, Brendel is divisive. Gramophone may have revered him, but he claimed the hostile German critic Joachim Kaiser held his career back in the German-speaking world by a decade. The merit of a reference recording must be a matter of near-consensus, in contrast. Perhaps Brendel also suffered from arriving at a time when a good many reference recordings already existed, such as Schnabel's Beethoven and Cortot's Chopin. Moreover, there were probably a dozen top pianists recording great parts of the repertoire during his Phillips career. The issue was more one of choosing a favourite than having a single library choice. Schubert was perhaps the composer where he could stake a claim to a unique achievement. To make a great piano recording you need a great pianist on form and a fairly simple recording setup. A great opera recording depends on a happy constellation of singers, conductor, orchestra and recording engineers: total successes are rarer and stand out more. Perhaps true reference recordings of the piano repertoire will be rarer and their status more controversial.
My first exposure to Brendel was through his VOX Turnabout LPs. I really liked those recordings, especially the Mozart piano concertos. Strangely, Brendel has disavowed them.
Good topic. My own puzzlement these days revolves around why PERAHIA is the top result for so many search engines (Apple Music, etc.). Is he married to some search engine wizard in Silicon Valley? Somehow, he's what everyone thinks I want to hear when I search for a certain range of classical piano music.
Never could get excited about Brendel, except maybe a couple of unusual things like Liszt's Malediction and the transcription of Weber's Oberon Overture. Heard him do a couple of LvB concertos at the Hollywood Bowl, not memorable. Good, solid mid-20th Century pianism, but I'm a Golden Age enthusiast and much recorded from roughly the 50's and later strikes me as competent but not especially enthralling. I could add many names to the list, at the risk of arousing the the ire and nasty dismissal of their cultists, both on the podium and at the keyboard. On the other hand(s), I've been a big admirer of Arrau, and heard him do some wonderful things in a couple of recitals. One of the best Appassionatas and Chopin 1st Scherzos ever.......and Les Jeux......(Liszt) that was like a long, arching aria. In his later recordings he could sound too reserved and kind of fragmented, and he had a funny way with big chords at times, as if he was skittish about making a really big, orchestral sound. I spoke with him for about a minute after a recital and suggested that he might record some Busoni, who was the reigning piano monarch in Berlin during Arrau's youth.
Sometime in the mid 1990’s I heard Brendel play Beethoven Op. 110, No 31 and Schumann Symphonic Etudes live at Carnegie Hall. I was familiar with the Beethoven. I had heard recordings by Myra Hess, Pollini and a few others. I must say, Brendel did not have the magnificent tone or warmth of Myra Hess. I remember thinking that. I think that goes to the point. Brendel lacks a bit of emotional depth in his performances (even in Haydn) and so his recordings never endear you like those of others. However, Brendel absolutely matched the technical brilliance of Pollini, which was impressive, because that’s not an easy piece to pull off especially the final fugue. Of course, I was lucky to hear the music live, so I was thrilled.
The only Brendel that I have is his Beethoven Piano Concerto cycle on Vox. It's not like I never heard of him, because he's a familiar name. At least for me, I think I have my "core" group of pianists and tend to stick with them: Buchbinder, Gilels, Perahia, Kempf, Pollini, Tharaud. I just never really listened to him.
Alfred Brendel is one of my favorite pianists. It was his Brahms Op.15 with Carlo Maria Giullini that introduced me to the piece. I have one of his complete Beethoven sonata recordings. I do recognize that there is little talk about him, as well as other pianists whom I revere. Brendel is a very thoughtful and intelligent man, as one concert pianist told me, once long ago. I appreciate his approach to the Beethoven sonatas, and his overall dedication to the integrity of the repertoire. I have heard a subsequent recording of the Brahms Op. 15 of Brendel's, which I did not like as much as the Giulini offering. Overall, I do like him a great deal. **Addendum, it was Alexis Weissenberg and Giulini recording of Brahms that I owned, not Brendel. Faulty memory, sorry. My remarks about Brendel stand, however. I am now listening to his Beethoven concerto recordings with Bernard Haitink and the London Philharmonic. They are very pure to me, and allow Beethoven's music room to breathe and speak.
I agree with David and respectfully disagree with Jeremy Berman. I bought Brendel’s Beethoven sonata cycle recorded in the 90s. At that time, I was very enthusiastic about it, but I started to lose interest in his 'brittle' tone not long after. Soon, Gilels and Richter's passionate interpretations of Beethoven started to capture my attention, and over time, I concluded that if I wanted to listen to a Germanic or Austrian Beethoven, it's better to stick with Kempff or Backhaus. Listening to Brendel would only make sense if Kempff didn’t exist, I thought. Besides, Arrau’s Beethoven has so much more personality than Brendel’s. I started to think that Brendel's success might not have been due to his musical virtues, but rather his intellectual persona - a man who writes with great technical knowledge and has strong opinions, a friend of Isaiah Berlin and who was the first husband of Ronald Dworkin’s Wife. With his scholarly appearance, I thought Decca would have good visual material to promote his pianism. But recently, I decided to listen to various renditions of the Moonlight Sonata. Such a worn-out tune... Richter never recorded it! The competition in this sonata is monstrous. But suddenly, it occurred to me that, to me, Brendel’s version won over all others. This is a hell of a feat. And I started to reconcile with him, and I have been enjoying his Mozart recordings from the 60s... His reputation is not so unwarranted, but it is easier to remember all the other great pianists whose technique was refined with the Romantics, with whom Brendel doesn’t spend much time.
My general feeling is that with Brendel somewhat epitomises the classical sensibility of restraint, rationality and containedness. As such, while it is possible to admire what he has achieved, something of the raw expressiveness/inherent romance of music is lost and that for me is essential to music being ‘alive’, or else it is anaemic.
The late, great New York City restaurant critic Seymour Britchky, in his ratings list, included one category called “Good (but not _as_ good)”. I think Brendel is often perceived as having fallen into that slot. 😎🎹
A personal rememberance about Brendel if I may.
I heard Brendel play a complete set of Schubert's sonatas at the Berlin Philharmonic in 1987 and/or 1988, which was truly beautiful. Somehow the modernity of that space seemed to fit completely with Brendel's playing ideally. And Brendel's rendering of Sonata 14 D.784 has always been right at the top of my personal musical Pantheon.
It so happened that this was not long before the Berlin Wall collapsed and I, doing my time of national service as a teacher at the Institut français, happened to belong to the then still standing "French Military Government of Berlin" (which I chiefly used to have free housing and cheap good food at the officers' dining room and go to East Berlin unbothered by East German guards and gorge on operas at the East Berlin Opera for a price close to zero).
Now at one of the concerts there happened to be, much to my dismay, a group of French pupils on some exchange program, almost all of whom didn't give a damn about Schubert or Brendel or anything (may the teachers who had the brilliant idea to take them there roast in hell), and they were very agitated and noisy.
During the intermission I took out my card of the military government, went to the teachers accompanyng the pupils and said sternly that as a member of said "Government" it was my duty to prevent the reputation of France from being unduly tarnished by such behaviours and I thus forbade them to go back in for the second part. (Of course I didn't have the slightest right to do that...)
Luckily the teachers (probably much ashamed themselves) humbly acquiesced, skimmed the pupils and let just a handful of them go back in for the second part, and those were nice and quiet.
Somebody must have told Brendel I had done that, because at the end of the concert he turned very clearly towards where I was seated and just nodded briefly with a smile - the most one could expect from such an even-tempered man.
God, was I proud and glad that I had way exceded my (non-existing) powers that day !
What a wonderful story!
Beautiful!
I knew him somewhat, and this sounds just right.
Brendel was a lot more than a creation of the classical music marketplace. I went to at least a dozen of his concerts at Carnegie Hall. Most of the programs included a sonata by Beethoven or Schubert. I'm the biggest fan of his non-digital Vanguard and Phillips recordings. But there's much to enjoy in his digital Beethoven sonata traversal. Brendel may not have the same type of popularity as other pianists do because of the personality he gave off at concerts. He was all about the music and could appear somewhat remote on stage. It depends on what one's expectations are. If you're expecting Martha Argerich, Arthur Rubinstein or, to take it even further, Yuja Wang (and I love both Argerich and Rubinstein) when you listen to or went to a concert, you/were are going to be very disappointed. The funny thing about the concert aura is, if one read books by Brendel or listened to him speak, he happened to have a wonderful sense of humor which one can hear in his Haydn sonata recordings, in particular. As far reference recordings are concerned, I would put his 1970s Phillips recordings of Schubert as reference recordings, the recording of the Impromptus Opus 90 & Opus 142, above all. Recordings of Schubert weren't as common then as they are now. And I think these recordings by Schubert had a hand in that. Brendel was one of the fine pianists of the second half of the 20th century, and that happens to be because he deserves it, not due to some faux marketplace creation. His career wouldn't have lasted over half a century, and his concerts wouldn't have been as well attended as they were. I was at his farewell concert at Carnegie Hall, and it's an experience I'll never forget.
Very intelligent post. Never saw AB live. (Watched him rehearsing at the RFH - until two security guards ordered me out.) Own quite a few of his records, though. He was a damned fine Mozart and Schubert pianist.
Met him in Hampstead a few years back. He was very friendly.
Well said
I heard Brendel do the Liszt B minor sonata in RFH. It was perfection.
@@AdamCzarnowski Bolet and Brendel are my favorite pianists for Liszt. And I can't really put Liszt among my favorite composers. One of my favorite Brendel concerts was one where he played Schumann (and Liszt, I think). His performance of Schumann's Carnaval was superb. Even the non-liking Brendel friend of mine who was with me at the concert was thrilled by the performance.
I agree that Brendel was a wonderful interpreter that should not be forgotten. He certainly favored wit and intellect over showmanship. I heard his last US concert and was extremely moved by it. In my hearing, no one gets closer to the character of Beethoven than Brendel does in the middle sonatas.
i heard Brendel’s fare-well tour in Edinburgh about 15 years ago. He had wonderful charisma. I cherish the memory, and enjoy his cd’s. A wonderful musician❤️
Yes. I agree. I disagree that he has ‘no allure’!
All I can say is that his recitals on London, especially his regular June recital at the Festival Hall or Barbican, were among the highlights of my concert-going life. And as far as CDs go, I'd always choose to hear Brendel in Beethoven or Schubert before any other pianist. Those are my “reference” recordings (and yes, I have Schnabel). His followers? Any London recital was packed to capacity. He even would agree to seating on the stage, as long as not quite in his line of sight. I attended his final London recital (impressive lineup of top pianists in the audience) and the piano concert scene has never seemed quite the same without him. Someone asked him why he was leaving the stage so soon and said “You’re leaving a big hole”, to which he quipped: “Well it’s nice to be leaving something”. I believe he was also very big in Japan. So to me, he's not gone. Far from it!
I owe Brendl . Back in 71-72, was out in the South Pacific, working the copra trade of the islands on a tramp ship. I was a homesick 19 year old, starved of European culture. In a ship chandlery near Port Moresby, I discovered a box of vinyl records, new & classical in genre. One was a Vox label, Brendl playing piano transcriptions of Petroushka, Islamey, and Mussorgsky's Pictures. Luckily, I had a wee Philips battery-powered player and played that vinyl to death. I owe my sanity to Brendl. The glory of his playing and the music convinced to do something with my life rather than be sailor on a tramp.
Thank you. That's a wonderful account. The recording you mention introduced me to those works too and his bargain priced Vox recordings in general introduced my teenage self to Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart and Liszt. My guess, in answer to Dave's question, is that a lot of people played these, and the Philips ones so often, and got to know them so well, that they've become part of the mental furniture and there's nothing more to say about them. I was privileged to see him a few times and I have to admit that out of my ten greatest concert hall experiences, three of them involved Brendel. Rather than just play, he was able to make the music tell a story.
Thanks for that. I agree.
I love Brendel. I think many people just find him too cerebral in his approach. And he does have some mannerisms that come up from time to time, in particular with regard to articulation.
I actually think his legacy is quite secured; and he was lucky to have great recording engineers at Philips (most of the time).
I agree. Every musician is human and they all have "mannerisms" from time to time. Doesn't mean we don't enjoy them.
mannerisms? Brendel? really?
@@dannydiyitang2180 Hahaha! I was trying to be polite.
I think that fluctuations of taste in the culture are partly responsible. Yes, Brendel was a scholarly, unspontaneous, rather pedantic and stiff pianist - but he did have a real impact not just on the public, but on other musicians, and that's because he actually did in fact have an interesting artistic profile despite his limitations. He thought deeply about the music and had a very high standard; nothing got in unless it was exactly what he meant. You might hate or be bored by a Brendel performance, but you could always learn something from it (even from his failures of imagination) because it was so carefully thought out, and because the innards of the piece were so exposed - no combovers, nothing done for the sake of a pretty effect. It had substance. This will eventually lead to his work being rediscovered, I suspect. But the current moment is not one where high priests of scholarly rectitude, sober, respectable, deadly serious and entirely without any element of flash, are going to make much headway. To some extent this reaction is healthy - Earl Wild has been decriminalized! - but like all trends, it goes too far, and commerce ensures that all taste is pushed to the point of becoming bad taste.
The late Mozart recrdings with Mackerras were exceptional
His early Mozart concerti for Vox are terrific, too.
@@poturbg8698 His VOX recording of Concerto in G K453 is especially good! Also the Schubert-Liszt version of Wanderer Fantasy.
I am an old geezer who first of all wants to thank you for rekindling in me my youthful self-trained ardor for classical music, gone dormant for recent decades until I discovered your good-humored enthusiasm for much to which I had never given much thought and your fascinating convictions that sometimes contradict my own: Haydn over Mozart?! Ever?! Well, apart from his amazing piano sonatas. So thank you for waking me back up.
As for Brendel, in my earliest enthusiasm the Berkeley Public Library offered numberless borrowable Vox Boxes, the result of which is that it is Brendel’s take on numberless piano pieces that seems to me bedrock. And then one evening when we all were still quite young he gave an all-Schubert concert at the university that introduced to me the Wanderer Fantasy and the B-flat sonata with an electrifying immediacy [a “living presence”?] that I still can feel when I hear either of them, the one so full of optimism, the other so haunted by oblivion. That experience made Brendel important to me for the rest of his career. But he did seem a bit of an odd duck, an idea I’ll illustrate by a concert in Seattle in the 1990s when, during a pianissimo, some member of the audience tragically coughed, bringing the music to a halt and attracting the Basilisk gaze of the artist which I think atomized the poor cougher on the spot, after which the music could resume, and I reached for what I hoped would be a life-saving Ludens. So, in short, not at all so lovable a fellow on a stage as my greater hero, Rudolph Serkin, and therefore probably much easier in his retirement to ignore if not really to forget or reevaluate. Anyhow, my poor estimate. And I thank you again for more food for thought.
I don't blame AB for glaring at the cougher. Noisy audiences are the reason I stopped attending classical concerts.
Alfred Brendel is my most played pianist still - he is amazing and unique! I read in a newspaper some time ago that he had stopped playing because he suffers from severe tinnitus. I wish him warm regards, from Graz.
I'm fascinated: The elephant at the piano in all of the comments here is all those Mozart concertos he did with Mariner and the ASMF, which have barely been mentioned. As a budding Mozart fan in the '70s they were my reference recordings, and must have been for a lot of others. So soon we forget
I cannot live without his K.466 and K.491
Brendel's Beethoven Diabelli Variations (live recording) is still my favourite version of this piece.
Ditto!!!!! 🎹👍
Mine too, and a lot of people's.
Yes! Along with his Schubert I think it's the best of his considerable output. The Diabellis are particularly hard to get right and Brendel really seems to grasp both their humor and their profound, spiritual depths, and getting (and rendering) both convincingly is not an easy task.
Got to hear Brendel perform solo recitals on three separate occasions in Chicago's Orchestra Hall (now called Symphony Center). The 1975 performance opened with the Bach's Italian Concerto and was followed by Beethoven's 6 Variations on F major and 32 Variations in C Minor. The program also included Liszt's Variations on the Name B.A.C.H. A great , exciting recital! In the 1he 1977 recital, Brendel played the last three Beethoven Sonatas. He got lost in Op. 109 and had to jump some pages (I think that it was in the final movement where this mishap occurred). But this notwithstanding, an otherwise excellent performance. In 2002 I heard him perform Mozart's A major Sonata and Beethoven's Op. 22 Sonata in B flat. I loved it! What's not to love about Brendel's pianism? I always thought he was great and bought the big Decca/Philips box when it came out a few years back. Still think that Brendel performed the best Liszt A Major Concerto (# 2) I've ever heard (better even than Richter) and his Totentanz is also the best I've ever heard. And just think that Brendel's Schubert and Mozart are, in general, fabulous. So what's not to love about Brendel's playing? I hold him right up there with Ashkenazy and Pollini as one of the greatest pianists of the later 20th Century.
Brendel first got me into the late Beethoven sonatas as well as late Schubert. Around the time he stopped performing I was also lucky enough to attend one of his lectures. It was on the subject of the Beethoven sonatas and he had structured his talk around short sections he compared to the four elements: reciting passages where the music flowed like water, floated like air, became solid or else burst in fire. It was a fun idea that is very far from the more familiar kinds of academic musicology. Overall, I've always felt that he played the works of both composers (Beethoven and Schubert) with a very sympathetic ear, doing his utmost to honour their musical and emotional intentions above and beyond imposing too much of his own personality. And I think he totally gets Beethoven's quirkiness and humour more than most pianists. What some might see as Brendel's stuffiness is certainly a facade.
He's 93 and does get about! Bumped into him last Sunday at the Wigmore Hall for his beloved Paul Lewis recital (Schubert's last 3 sonatas). His repertoire was somewhat limited, and even the Schoenberg Concerto has a double Brendel recording (Kubelik and Gielen) - quite beautiful, however.
Thank you for making this video! Although I have been collecting classical CDs for more than thirty years, at the time I watched this video about two weeks ago, I had never really listened to Alfred Brendel. I'm not sure why; he was certainly discussed by critics I read, but the reviews never made him sound like a top choice for me. And I guess he didn't get much radio play on the stations I listened to. So, I decided it was high time to give Brendel a listen. I saw some comments on this video praising his Schubert so I found a performance of the Wanderer Fantasy on TH-cam. I didn't expect to be blown away as I already have recordings by Richter and Rubenstein which tend to be top choices of critics. The performance astonished me. Brendel shot straight to the top of the list of my favorite performances of the piece.
I hopped onto Amazon and ordered his set of late Schubert Sonatas (including the Wanderer Fantasy, Impromptus and a couple of other things). I got his 1980s digital set simply because it was much more affordable than the earlier analog and most people say his interpretations haven't changed much throughout the years. The box arrived a couple of days ago and I've been listening, first to the Wanderer Fantasy then some of the sonatas. (I haven't gotten to the last three yet.) It's like hearing these works for the first time. Brendel seems to dig deep into the music and finds many treasures therein. His combination of superb technique, phenomenal intelligence, and deep humanity are unmatched in this music. His approach is completely unsentimental and unmannered but he can bring out Schubert's melodic lines and shifting moods like no one else I've heard. I just ordered his Mozart Concerto recordings with Marriner and I look forward to their arrival.
So, THANK YOU again for this and all your videos and your constant advice to "keep on listening!"
My introduction to Beethoven’s late piano sonatas is a Phillips Brendel recording. I have since added Pollini Wilhelm Kempff and an Australian pianist Gerard Willems versions but I still cherish Brendel’s rendition.
Something poetic and warm in his delivery that touched me deeply.
When I was on vacation in Romania in 2016, I was in the airport ready to head outside after getting my luggage. There was a man in a suit standing there with a sign that said "Alfred Brendel". I tried to stall for time so I could meet him. But because I had friends waiting outside to pick me up, I couldn't wait too long. A few days later, I discovered the Enescu Festival was going on, then I realized he was there for that. But at that time, he was already retired from playing and was only doing a lecture. Which was exactly what he said he would do. I was there for a concert, so I passed on his lecture and bought tickets to see Daniel Barenboim instead. I own that Brendel Box and I really enjoy it. I firmly believe his early works are his best. It has a nice, fresh take on the works, as compared to his later remakes. In my opinion anyway. I know that his public perception isn't the same as the other greats, but that has no effect on me. People will listen to who they like. But yes, it is a pity that his work isn't spoken with the same praise as his contemporaries. But yes, once he passes, I'm certain he will be re-evaluated.
Brendels Wandererfantasie of Schubert is absolute Reference Recording. I mean the Philips Recording 1971. Better than any other Recording.
Very good question! He certainly had an impact on me. Especially his Liszt-recordings. Like the Legend no 2. Very profound.
In the late 70s I heard him play the last three Schubert sonatas. He took a few measures to adjust his pedaling to the (wonderful) acoustics of Jordan hall at New England Conservatory. After that it was flawless and one of the most memorable recitals of my life. Then I heard him a year or two before he retired, and I couldn't believe the insensitive pounding throughout the program. It turned out his hearing was going and he didn't realize it. Someone should have told him sooner.
His "Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts " is wonderful, as is his masterclass on the Liszt Sonata (available on TH-cam).
He came out of a pack of journeyman middle European pianists of the '50s, any of whom were as good as he was--Klien, Demus, Badura-Skoda, Frankl. But fate somehow smiled upon him, and he became a star of the 70s and 80s. I tend to like his Vox and Vanguard early work far more than what came when he was in the spotlight. He deserves credit for allowing a whole generation of young music lovers to discover lots of great piano music on the cheap. Later on, IMO his Philips work was more mannered and reticent, and therefore less interesting. I'm happy to own the Brilliant set Dave was holding, but very little of the Philips stuff. I interviewed Brendel a couple of times and remember those occasions very fondly. A charming, witty man.
What you talk about at the end, about Brendel being a product of the classical music marketplace rather than the enthusiasm of listeners, is, I think, at the core of why he isn't mentioned much in discussions of reference (or "best") recordings. As you've said before, listeners are often smarter and more perceptive than musical marketers give them credit for, and a pianist like Arrau always had more going for him in terms of tone, technique, and interpretative depth. Brendel was a fine pianist, but I think many (including myself) were always skeptical of how much he was promoted, and intuitively knew that the promotional machine behind him outstripped his (still considerable) talents. I've still listened to a lot of Brendel, and if anything I appreciate his consistency and the fact that he DID have an interpretative vision... but at the same time he gives me comparatively few "Wow" moments compared to pianists like Arrau, Richter, Rubinstein, Argerich, Horowitz, or, even in modern times, Hamelin or Wang. I do, however, really, really like him in Schubert and Haydn. In a way he often reminds me of Wilhelm Kempff; a very sensitive, nuanced pianist that rarely went for bold flash, and that works really well for a composer like Schubert where the more you hold back, the more emotional depth seems to come out of his work. I also think he's one of the few pianists to really get Beethoven's Diabelli Variations.
Why aren't we talking about Brendel? I don't know. But there are a number of other pianists who made many fine recordings, almost always positively reviewed, that don't get discussed much and are unlikely to get your "reference" imprimatur. A few examples: Robert Casadesus, Richard Goode, Ivan Moravec, Gary Graffman, Emmanuel Ax.
An excellent point. It’s not as if the standard piano solo or piano with orchestra rep is lacking for fine recording artists. Manny Ax performs up here in Wisconsin with the Madison Symphony regularly and he’s never anything less than magnificent. I don’t know Brendel’s work well at all, but maybe cool, analytical literalism has had its day and neo-Romanticism is back in vogue.
@@AlexMadorsky check out Brendel’s Liszt recordings and on YT the sonata in b minor plus Schubert Impromptus.
I heard Brendel several times in the late Seventies and early Eighties, when he would have been in his prime. One concert featured the Schumann Piano Concerto with Claudio Abbado and the LSO. I can't remember ever hearing anything quite so dull and unimaginative.
I have never understood why he had such a high profile (and I have heard many of his recordings.)
To be fair some of his early recordings on Vox weren't bad and had a freshness and spontaneity that were often lacking later in his career. However, his reputation rests largely on the later recordings with Phillips.
Marketing must have played a large part. (Brendel instead of Arrau????)
He was IMO very overrated.
@@tarakb7606 Whereas at my first Prom I heard him play Beethoven 1 and it was absolutely brilliant. He got something like 7 curtain calls but didn't do an encore! But I would listen to Brendel for Mozart or Beethoven, not so much Schumann.
I never heard him playing Schumann live. Apparently it's not his standard repertoire. But go and listen his Beethoven Concerto, Schubert Sonata, Haydn and Mozart. That's his universe. can not blame you, it sounds like your knowledge of Brendel is extremely lacking
@@tarakb7606
Brendel is such a great pianist. I like his versions of the Beethoven sonatas - he played them as they were written, without unnecessary inflections and he never adds over rubato. Just touches were needed. He also doesn’t play TOO FAST like many others I’ve heard where they RUIN the music. I met Brendel in Melbourne Australia in the early 70s. Great man!
If you haven't, please do a spot like this one on Rudolf Serkin. I am loving your perspectives on the 20th century luminaries of classical music. Many of them were my idols back in the 70s when I was a music student myself.
Brendel did a very fine Schoenberg piano concerto with the SWF Symphony Orchestra, Baden-Baden, conducted by Michael Gielen, which is pretty much MY reference recording for the piece... so many performers forget that Schoenberg was the cat behind VERKLARTE NACHT, and they go at his 12 tone pieces like they were playing Bartok or Antheil. Brendel and Gielen bring out the romanticism in the Piano Concerto instead of making it a hammerfest.
My first Brendel recording, and my first Schoenberg recording, was this very performance of the Piano Concerto. It's from early in his career. I always wondered why he didn't play the concerto because it fit with the German Romantics that were the core of his repertoire, just as Uchida has done
I see that you do not like his Haydn, but his four CD\LP set of the sonatas was a landmark in Haydn sonata discography and only after this music started to get the attention it deserved in many ways a "reference recording" for this music if ever there was one. And the Mozart\ Marriner set is as classic as the Anda or Perahia sets, whether we consider it "reference" recording or not. His "mature" Schubert piano music set ( which he did twice for Philips) was also a major event because until then pianists tended to play only the D. 960. He was a major figure in the acceptance of sonatas nos. 16-19 to the major repertoire.
I had my Schubert served by the likes of Pollini and Lupu, and only afterwards learned that Brendel's was supposedly the reference. After listening the sonatas, I found him dry and safe. Reference I trust he is not. Btw, if you don't mind such imposition: please make a video on the late Pollini, I would enjoy that. Thanks
I can only say that if I had not listened to Alfred Brendel's recordings of Beethoven's Bagatelles op126; or Liszt Sonata; or, Mozarts Double Piano Concerto (also featuring the wonderful Walter Klien)...(All on Vox), my life would have been immeasurable the poorer. So, whatever his current reputation may (or, may not) be, this can never diminish the very special admiration that I, personally have always felt for him even when some of his performances may have failed to reach the same level of greatness.
I love Brendel. He’s my go-to pianist when it comes to Beethoven. I find his performances very powerful and dramatic. Dave has a point, though, that he hurt himself by recording four sonata cycles. The performances are bound to be compared against each other which can’t be good for any of them.
When you spoke of him in a postmortem way, I had to check--because Brendel has been my reference for many things for decades; his Vox of the late Beethoven sonatas was my introduction to those works--because I actually think about Brendel now and then, and a few months ago I checked to see if he was still around and he was, and when I checked just now it appears he still is, alive if not kicking at 93.
Brendel's popularity in UK has not waned from what I can tell. His interpretations of the classics are always spoken of with reverence and still come out top in BBC 'Building a library'. My personal favourites are his Haydn, his Mozart Sonatas and the concertos with the great Sir Charles Mackerras and the SCO. I have a recording taken from the BBC of a performance of Schubert A major from Snape that I've always seen as the reference recording in my head. And his 80s impromptus are magical and spontaneous in ways that other artists don't seem to match. Some of his Liszt is superb especially his Late Liszt disc though the sonata recordings from the 80s does nothing for me.
As someone who encountered Brendel's work first in fhe 1960's, I can tell you he was no mere creation of record labels. Then, the number of concerts in NY and elsewhere promoted him widely and his audience was enthusiastic. I think his relative absence from CDs stems from the fact that he recorded everything so many times that it was difficult to decide who was the "real" Brendel. He was a deeply thoughtful artist who has studied music all his life, and his interpreations, his "quirks" (as you ungenerously called them) are the results. That is perhaps the more interesting question relating to why his sad absence from today's scene came about.
Here is one recording of his that I think is the best: his Philips Duo set of the Schubert Impromptus and Moments Musicaux. As much as I love Schiff, Curzon, and others, his renditions of these Schubert pieces are my favorites.
What may not be considered - he did many things in Germanic repertoire well consistently, but what was truly great? It could be why he was well liked and respected. But some artists create a splash because they perform certain works so well - for example Richter in the Appassionata and Hammerklavier (Royal Festival Hall) or certain Schubert (and Richter had some Schubert that is very questionalble). Solomon left some superb performances in Beethoven sonatas. For all the talk about Brendel's Schubert, Lupu performed publicly the last Schubert Sonata that wowed audiences in major cities across the globe. Arrau certainly has his fans and certainly had a record label behind him, but it will be curious which works you think Arrau delivered the type of performance Richter did in the Appassionata or Rubinstein in the Brahms Piano Sonata No. 3 or Michelangeli in the Brahms Ballades, all works deep in the German piano repertoire. But perhaps some of Brendel's best performances come in works that are not of the romantic era, his Haydn is quite good. Too bad Haydn is not so popular and Mozart, which launched Uchida, is. Personally, I saw Brendel and thought he was a very fine pianist and deserving of a big reputation. Not everyone need have hit the home run, just providing something very, very good consistently should be respected.
Good question and, for those of us who admire him enormously, rather troubling. The two Philips Beethoven cycles back-to-back confused people; I think maybe it had something to do with the lukewarm critical reception for the first (i.e. second overall). The Penguin Guide gave it a brief but memorable kicking, saying it didn't match Brendel's live Beethoven, and for that reason he included live performances in the third cycle. He himself recognises that the studio performances publicised by Philips so heavily weren't always his best, and it was only in later years that stunning live readings of the Diabellis and late Beethoven sonatas became easy to find. It didn't help that everyone including publicists and commissioning editors found him so intimidating, though he can be very witty and his mocking of period-performance mannerisms is as savage as yours, Dave. Personally I'd choose some of his recordings as Desert Island discs, but there's no getting away from the fact that his repertoire was more heavily weighted to the Austro-German classics than any modern pianist I can think of. Think of all the composers he barely or never touched: Bach (one great disc), Chopin (a tiny proportion), Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Ravel, Rachmaninov (one of his pet hates) and Prokofiev (he disowned his early recordings of the Fifth Concerto). But, to put it another way, he knew his limitations, including the limitations of some of studio recordings of his beloved classics that he did try to displace with remarkable live performances.
I first became aware of Alfred Brendel when I came to Boston in 1969 to study with the great pianist and teacher Katja Andy who came from a musical German family whose mother studied with Clara Schumann, talk about a connection to the 19th century. Around Miss Andy, as she was known, were a group of pianist who grew out of a shared association with Edwin Fischer including, but not limited to Alfred Brendel, Paul Badura Skoda, Veronica Jochum, Greta Sultan, Agi Jambor, Evelyn Crochet and later on Russell Sherman and Lois Shapiro. None of this group were exactly her students; she was the senor advisor of the group who shared an intense commitment in their music making that made them more musicians than performers. When she was happy with a performance Miss Andy would say, among other things, that it was "expository" which I took to mean that it exposed something deep about the music. She did value warmth and what she called being "musical". I heard most of these artist at one time or another and there was a shared depth in their music making that separated them from other pianists I heard. I remember Miss Andy saying she had difficulty enjoying hearing Vladimir Horowitiz. She also told me she regarded Rosina Lhevinne as a "great figure" but stopped sort of saying she was a great musician.
I heard Brendel many times and there was an intensity that set him apart. The halls were always full of appreciative admirers though one got the feeling they were not exactly the people who would come out for other pianists of that generation. I left my musical education behind years ago much to the relief of Miss Andy; I was not talented but she and this group left an enormous impression on my musical tastes. I don't think Brendel is forgotten. He was never a crowd pleaser, always at the service of the music which required devoted concentration from himself and his audience. The rewards are many but his performances are intense on both sides.
Thanks for raising this point about Alfred Brendel and his reception amongst today's listeners. I agree that Brendel seems more popular within the recording industry than with consumers, but this might be less about the quality of his playing and more about the market itself. Perhaps being able to have a wide repertoire and play it pretty well, but never really with the kind of individuality or originality (as say Gould or Schnabel, to take extreme examples), makes for good sales but not memorable recordings. Heard live, this may be a different story, as Brendel is a great artist without question, but he may have been a product of the industry at the time, cultivated for sales, with nothing too eccentric or controversial, and pitched for consumption. He is eminently listenable, and that may be his greatest shortcoming (?)
I take advantage of this opportunity to share what was for me a learning experience: I have many recordings from Brendel (among them also the piano concertos with Levine and with Rattle). I was never impressed by his sound (his recorded sound). However, very different was the impression I had attending one of his performances in Hamburg. It was a great surprise for me, since the marvelous sound he projected was quite different than the sound I had in mind from his recordings. Since then I am more cautious regarding recordings: as good and convenient as they are, they cannot tell us the "whole story" of an artist.
No, but we aren't wrong to judge them all the same. The sound is what it is.
I agree. There is no contradiction in the statements. For whatever reason, the recorded sound did not capture the richness of the sound produced during the concert. I did not have the privilege to attend a concert by Arrau, but I prefer his recordings to the ones of Brendel (both being from the same label). Arrau's voicing of the cords, his sound, is superb and was very well captured.
A recording of Alfred Brendel playing Schubert's sonata in A minor was one of the early classical CDs I bought when I was in my 20"s and and the format was new. It was among the recordings that greatly increased my fondness of classical music. The recordings that you buy early in your listening history may not necessarily be the very best available but I don't think that matters so much if they increase your appreciation of the art form. In fact that would be an interesting topic for a Dave Hurwitz video: recordings I once loved that now I revile. Please consider it, Dave!
I always got the impression that Alfred Brendel (more than other folks) saw himself not just as a musician/pianist, but also as some kind of public intellectual concerning all kinds things related to music. I always got the impression that he wanted to be seen as a terribly smart guy. Some people prefer to let the music speak for itself. Others like to also comment and elaborate on the pieces, the composer, their approach to music making, etc. Which some listeners may find interesting and stimulating, while others may find it rather irritating. This could be part of the answer to your. But just as well i could be completely on the wrong track.
Trivial, I know, but perhaps one of the reasons for Brendel's appeal to the marketplace was that he looked good on a record cover - and he aged well. He had just that kind of professorial, slightly impish, old-school look, with the scholarly glasses and the tousled hair (unlike Arrau, who looked like a stern Germanic headmaster) that encouraged confidence in his interpretation...
I think Brenden has a lot of fans. Even among the regular commenters here. I like him a lot. He brings out harmonies in chords so deliciously. And his Beethoven last three sonatas reach a depth for me that other pianists don’t quite get to. My humble opinion of course. I might be courting backlash here, but I wonder if the commenters just might not be brown nosing you. We all know you don’t often promote his recordings in the repertoire series. And we all know you love Arrau. You are an authority figure of sorts and it might be that unconsciously, we just want you to like us as much as we like you. 🤷 So we don’t mention Brendel. But we mention Arrau in the hopes that you give a positive reply. Hope I’m not offending anyone but I think there is a psychological phenomenon happening here. 😅
Possible, but I've always been a fan of his Liszt and I've said so here many times.
@@DavesClassicalGuide True. One of the qualities I admire about you is that you are fair. Even with Rattle you rate his Szymanowski. Personally I don’t like Brendel’s Liszt though 😅
I think you are spot on.
I worked for Tower Records mail order department in the early to mid 1990s. I always appreciated his Vox Beethoven sonata cycle, which was dirt cheap and a great choice for the budget minded customer. Some of his recordings have aged better than others, but in my opinion the Mozart piano concertos he did near the end of his career, with Mackerras conducting, are marvelous.
They absolutely are! As a fellow Towerian, working a classical section, I had been a bit oversaturated and perhaps jaded. Other pianists were my heroes. But whenever I did hear him live, it was very good. Not great as in overwhelming, but special. One had to listen, and he made one listen. His quality wasn't always an overt one. But it also, definitively, wasn't 'Emperor's Cloths'.
During my years as a piano student, right before Music College, Brendel was my favourite pianist alongside Rubinstein. As the time passed by, I still kept liking him, but there was a certain disenchantment. He used to be to me like the "perfect" interpreter, the most loyal, most analytical, etc. I found out later that all this was more a critic's and teacher's propaganda. When I finally was able to get into some more difficult and interesting repertoire I discovered that the score and the composers leave a lot of space for "interpretation" and that those supposed most analytical players, many times add their own stuff: from ornamentation to changes in the articulations, dynamics and tempi that were not there in the score, AT ALL!!! And to my surprise that was also the case with Brendel. When I started working on Schumann's opus 17, I found out that Kempff and Arrau were way more in consonance with the score than Brendel was. I still love Brendel's approach and "vibe", BUT I see now that much of that image was marketing. The "super intelectual and analytic piano player" above the mere virtuosistic and "dumb" kinds that always go along and change stuff in the heat of the moment because they have no respect for the composer and just want to show off. Now I see that the then so called "dumb" velocists were not so dumb at all and that the super intelectuals were not right all the time, they also make "doubtful" decisions. Anyhow, I still love Brendel BUT I'm discovering so much of pianists I then refused to hear more often, names like Gulda, Cziffra and Argerich, and some that were out of my radar like Ciccolini and Samson François.
I read in an interview with him that he felt that part of his success was due to the fact that he could be absolutely consistent from take to take which made life much easier for the engineers for comping takes together. Maybe that's one of the reasons Philips liked him so much: maybe from the point of view of studio time he was fast and accurate and so relatively cheap to record. I suspect this is the kind of thing that figures highly in record label management meetings.
Brian Eno has the saying "turn your flaws into secret strengths," I wonder if in this case a strength was a secret flaw? Maybe it's perceived that his playing is controlled, studied, indeed reproducible but not spontaneous. Is that fair? I don't know. I've only heard his Schubert piano sonatas which I liked. (There's a good homework assignment: I should listen to more recordings of the Schubert piano sonatas)
The same can be said about Barenboim…where is his name in the Beethoven, Mozart…etc reference recordings?
Brendel was my first Beethoven sonata cycle, and I ended up never listening to it very much. I had the Ashkenazy 2-disc set of named sonatas that I preferred, and then I started collecting the digital Kovacevich.
Brendel’s Pathétique came on our local classical station recently and my wife commented on how light and soft and lovely it was. Which of course, in the outer movements, is exactly what the Pathétique shouldn’t be. I heard his Appassionata about a week later and now I don’t remember my opinion of it, which in itself is telling.
Brendel retired while he was ahead, and not trotted out for self-humiliation like the late great Pollini. He struck me like a school master-like artist, always correct and proper, without the outward flair of some of his contemporaries. Loved his Liszt and Schubert, and occasionally sampled his early stuff on Vox - Mussorgsky's Pictures, Stravinsky's Petrushka and Balakirev Islamey - just for the fun of it (Guess the pianist!)
My all-time favourite disc of was his Recital for the benefit of Amnesty International - with Liszt's Funerailles, Berg's Sonata and Busoni's Toccata. The earlier cassette also had Liszt's Sposalizio and something else I can't remember. Dave is right, he ought to be remembered.
Let’s start with those adorable portraits on the Phillips Beethoven cycle. Those big horn rimmed glasses and a look of surprise. In the seventies this image was unusual and arresting. It really stood out. So I had to have one of them (pathetique) at home. That’s the first thing that springs to mind when I see the re issues. A fine argument for the original artwork which hasn’t been seen since.
I first discovered Brendel when I heard his Schubert Impromptus decades ago and have loved his interpretation of them since. There is a delightful TH-cam video of his mentoring of Kit Armstrong that does not concentrate on the music, but rather Brendel's life in the delightfully named village of Plush in Dorset. A charming film that gives some insight to the man and his life in Dorset. The video is - Set the Piano Stool on Fire - sadly it's been moved behind a paywall now
Interesting that Brendel's star seems to have faded a bit. I suspect he belongs to the class of musicians who are "more respected than loved." Though I don't consider myself a fan, I do admire Brendel's musicianship. He was fundamentally a classicist and one whose musical priorities were intellectual rather than sensual. And that's why I am particularly impressed by his Liszt. His Phillips recordings of that composer were the first to alert me to the fact that there is more to Liszt's piano works than flashy virtuosity. To my ears, Brendel's interpretations of his chosen repertoire became more cerebral as he aged, and that's why I tend to favor his earliest efforts for Vox and Vanguard. His recording of Mozart's two-piano works with Klien is for me a "reference recording." It may seem odd to compare him with Gould, but there are some striking similarities. Both were intellectualists rather than sensualists, and both cultivated a dry tone and pointillistic touch that were consciously anti-"pianistic." Their Haydn performances are quirky in very similar ways.
I'm honestly quite surprised about this video. I consider his Schubert as the best one on record, specially the late sonatas and the Impromptus. He was probably the most intellectual and insightful pianist of his his generation. His explanations about Liszt's Années are wonderful (I prefer them to his interpretation), as well as his books of essays and interviews. He could be also nasty and maybe pedantic in his remarks. For example, he said that Rachmaninov, Puccini and Léhar form a Bermuda triangle in music and that the works of Rachmaninov don't deserve the consideration that they get!
Brendel was a very fine pianist, with a delicate touch and a sure sense of musicianship. I personally don't think he had the "muscle" for Beethoven or Brahms, but his Haydn Sonatas, Mozart Concerti, and even Schubert Sonatas, I've always found quite lovely.
But then....there always were the flashy pianists who always got the hype from the media. Brendel was a fine musician and I've enjoyed many of his recordings.
7:20 I never thought of Brendel's Haydn as strange, at least not as strange as Gould's! I first got to know and love Haydn's sonatas after buying a recording by Brendel. Later, I bought a box played by Gould. I gave the latter to a friend, who didn't like Haydn, but liked what Gould did with/to him.
I love his Haydn and Mozart sonatas.
I discovered Brendel in the late-1970s with his Philips LP of the Schubert Wanderer Fantasy and the D960 Sonata, also my introduction to both works. I agree that a bit of the purity of those Schubert recordings dissipated when he redid them all for digital. But I bought the complete Brendel-Schubert set when Philips, oops, Decca brought them out on CD and play them often. Pollini is showier and just as fine technically, of course, but I feel that the composer himself speaks in Brendel's playing. Miraculous.
I like Alfred Brendel’s interpretation of Schubert Piano Sonata’s and I remember going to the Albert Hall in the early 70’s to hear him play a Beethoven Piano Concerto as part of the BBC Proms which was excellent.
My favourite recording of Beethoven’s Emperor concerto is Claudio Arrau with the Staatskapelle Dresden conducted by Sir Colin Davis.
Agreed.
I agree completely about that Arrau/Davis/Dresden Emperor Concerto! Not only an amazing performance but in terms of recording, one of the best sounding CDs I've ever heard!
Cyprien Katsaris is another pianist that seems to have disapeared from the mainstream classical media...It's sad😢
I've certainly noticed the "everyone pays attention when someone dies" phenomena. British publications (such as The Strad) seem to just LOVE this, incessantly pointing out the death of people they almost certainly never so much as mentioned the existence of while they were alive. ("So-and-so was most known as being a back-chair second violinist with an orchestra you've never heard of. He was 91 and retired from playing and teaching 25 years ago. But his death is, apparently, notable enough to bump coverage of actual living musicians for.")
I remember reading an article on Earl Wild, a gossipy sort of interview, in which Wild groused about "...the Brendelization of piano playing." I got a chuckle out of that line.
It's interesting you mention Arrau. Both Brendel and Arrau recorded a lot of Beethoven, but that left little room for other repertoire. Arrau excelled in his very few recordings of Spanish music (Albeniz, Granados) and Brendel has spoken of his admiration for the Chopin Preludes, which he never recorded.
His one-off Bach recording still appeals to me.
It’s a great shame he didn’t do more Bach- the wtc or the Partitas, for example.
I don't consider myself to be widely versed or sophisticated about pianists, though I've probably heard most of the big names at least one time. I love Brendel's TH-cam recordings of the late Schubert sonatas, especially the last (and IMO best) one. It's the only version I've heard that doesn't take the first movement too slow. He introduced me to those sonatas, on TH-cam, and for that I'm extremely grateful.
He was a straight-as-an-arrow do exactly as the composer says type, probably a little too safe at times. I've heard people say his recordings lack a point of difference.
His Schubert stuff is first-rate though
I was born in 1992 for context- by the time I was a teenager Brandel and Pollini represented the extreme version of post-war non-romantic pianism. Both also took themselves SO seriously- or at least were marketed as such. So when I was growing us, they were already out of fashion. Certainly a rich pallete of colors and attention to nuance of sound are usually missing in Brendel's playing. You would think at least his sense of structure and style would be impressive, but I listened yesterday to his reccording of the Rondo of Op. 2 No. 2, which sounded uneven and heavy handed.
My reference for the Bethoven sonatas are Kempff, Schiff and Goode. I never heard a Brendel performance which I prefered to either of those.
If you haven't read it, the Rosen vs. Brendel op. 110 debate is great, and Rosen wins with a knockout.
All that being said, Brendel is a good teacher and tremendous promoter of young talents, so bravo to him for that!
For a long time Brendel's recording on Philips of Schubert's last piano sonata D. 960 was my favourite... until Maurizio Pollini came along.
For me Brendel is still the first choice in Schubert.
I don't like his Mozart, Beethoven or Haydn.
But his Schubert is superb in bringing out harmony and seconary melodies and motives...
Brendel was my introduction to the Hammerklavier. Amazing. My reference recording to it.
Good point though, why has Brendel become to unknown?
I first became aware of Brendel in the late 60's because of my piano teacher's enthusiasm for his playing. I don't think Brendel as yet had played in the US (I could be wrong, of course) but I do know it was only later that his reputation in America had grown exponentially. I heard him play the "Tempest Sonata" here in Vienna in 1973 at the Musikverein, and I approached him after the concert to tell him how much I enjoyed his Vox recordings of the Beethoven Piano Concertos (from the 60's), to which he grinned and replied, "I'm about to re-record them"! (which I think he did at least 3 or 4 times more). Funny, though that no one has mentioned that the reason he retired was that he developed arthritis in both hands which made playing such works as the "Hammerklavier" Sonata too painful.
FWIW, I like Brendal's stuff a lot (the Beethoven concerto set with Chicago and that person, the late Schubert Sonatas, the Mozart Concertos, a live performance of the Liszt Sonata I heard at the Kennedy Center, etc.), but in no music is he my personal favorite. I wonder if this is a common view, and provides the answer to your question.
I agree he was best in his vox period. His schubert moments musicaux/three pieces on vox is wonderful. I really also like his duet work with Walter Klein on vox.
There's an interesting recording of him playing two concertos at Bruno Maderna's final concert - Bartok 1 and the Schoenberg. I love Brendel's Liszt - he consistently displays a great sense of narrative and drama in the larger pieces like the Norma Fantasie, the Benediction and the Sonata. But his Philips recording of Sposalizio (Annees 2) and Vox Paganini Etudes are also well worth hearing. His book pointed me to several important historical recordings including Edwin Fischer's Mozart Fantasia K 475 from 1941, now remastered on APR. I agree that his early Vox Mozart Piano Concertos and his late ones with Mackerras are full of magnificent playing. He recorded Mozart Ch'Io Mi Scordi Di Te...Non Temer, Amato Bene, K 505 with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in 1968 - wonderful stuff, and I highly recommend his playing on the "In Portrait" DVD.
He definitely exists for me! I had the pleasure to experience Brendel 1993 in Salzburg with the Vienna Philharmonic under Frans Brüggen; Mozarts piano concerto No.20 and Beethovens piano concerto No.3 unforgettable!! He is is one of just a few pianists I listen regularly on records, especially Mozart, Schubert and Liszt...
I totally agree. Listening to Brendel felt like eating your vegetables. You had the feeling it was good for you but it wasn't as much fun as it might be. However, I remember listening to a a Philips two for of Mozart Piano Concertos and being surprised that it was him who was playing on it. I think if we can get away from the persona and just listen to the music there may be some really good things there. However, he's never going to be exactly exciting.
Alfred Brendel was my entry into classical music. I heard his Schubert D960 in a record store in 1987 just as CD was becoming dominant, and I had to have it. Since all Polygram mid-price CDs were on sale @ 3 for $25, I also bought his disc of Mozart PCs 23 and 27 and HVK's 1970s Beethoven 9. Eventually I bought his Mozart PC box set, some of his Mozart Piano Sonatas, his Schubert and Beethoven piano box sets. I always liked Brendel.
I heard play Brendel 4 Schubert Recitals in 1988 in Frankfurt and it was in most parts a very idiomatic Schubert playing to remember - with a fine balance of melancholy, viennese rythms and brisk tempos. He had to play differently than other great pianists because his technique was not allowing the russian repertoire nor romantic etudes. But for example the Brahms concertos got very good playing by him - by contrast his Mozart sonatas were not comparable to those of Gulda or later Uchida. My parenta generation (now in the 80ties and 90ties) love him nevertheless very much.
After receiving initial wet-nursing by Ingrid Haebler (Schubert and Schumann) who inspired me to try and do my best at playing the piano myself, Brendel waltzed into my early teens with his Schubert and (analogue) Beethoven. Both were on Philips, and that may have had something to do with the fact that my father, being a Philips employee, could buy those records with a substantial discount. Now when I turned 14 or so, I had requested the Beethoven concertos box with Brendel and Haitink as a (granted, rather expensive) birthday gift. But my father thought I could make do with a 'mixed' cycle on three seperate LP's by three different pianists, all on budget reissues which were then extremely cheap in the so-called "Philips Personeelswinkel". Although I did not not know any of the pianists on offer I was very disappointed at not getting the Brendel box, that also had much better looks I thought. The box, not the man, I should add. So, after some really unforgivable behaviour on my part and some assistance from my mother who always thought of ways to get may father to spoil us kids rotten, he duly went back to the Philips Personeelswinkel and exchanged the seperate albums for the Brendel box. Although I now regret being such a spoiled brat at that time I have never ever regretted getting that Beethoven concertos box. I have really worn out those records. They were magical to me. Of course that also has a lot to do with the greatness of one Ludwig van Beethoven...
So there you have my personal Brendel anecdote.
Brendel is/was a great pianist. His analogue Schubert sonatas held me spellbound and I even loved his digital remakes, although they weren't perhaps really necessary. Someone mentioned his Haydn being humorous and I couldn't agree more. Brendel really did a great job making me reassess Haydn's stature as a composer. Before that I had thought of Haydn as Mozart's "moronic nephew" (perhaps someone knows a better translation of this very Dutch expression?) but now I know better!
And oh, his KV 310! It was Brendels recording that made me desperately want to play this sonata myself! (That took a lot of practice!). Should I go on?
If there is a reason, it might be that in Brendel's core repertoire -Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, it is a field crowded with outstanding players and recordings - I have some individual recordings of his Schubert and Beethoven sonatas, but complete box sets of the Schubert works by Kempff and Uchida in the former, and Barenboim and Rudolf Buchbinder in the latter case -but they are all good, so how would Brendel be elevated above the rest?
His flinty, modern, intellectual sound was good for futurist late Liszt. And that's probably where he is still right up there for me. His Haydn is also very good because i think he identified greatly with Papa's quirky sense of humor. Otherwise, Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart just had way too much competition.
I didn't get seriously into Beethoven until my father bought Brendel's complete Beethoven piano works on 21 albums from Murray Hill in the 60s, so I owe him a debt of gratitude. I never saw him live, unfortunately. Something I have said frequently for years is that Lang Lang should be chained in Brendel's basement for a year until he learns proper playing style.
I am more fond of early Brendel from the 1950s and 60s.
I was in high school when Brendel was recording for Vox nd critics were loudly touting him as an "underdog" talent who deserved a better label. Then when he was promoted to Philips he kind of disappeared. Having done their job, critics moved on, I guess.
Brendel is my go-to for the Beethoven sonatas - with the one exception of Richter's studio Appassionata. I also remember his debut LP for Vox - Islamey, Petrouchka Suite, and Pictures at an Exhibition. SRSLY.
As noted in other comments, I was starting my collection about the time that Phillips was promoting Brendel. So, he was my introduction to the Schubert sonatas, Liszt and a few other composers. What happened was Arrau and Ashkenazy. It snowballed from there--de Larrocha for Mozart, Schiff for Schubert. So many great pianist to choose from, and it seemed there was always someone I liked better than Brendel.
Alfred Brendel is a Toyota Camry. A great all rounder that will safely take you from A to B every time, but not one that will top any list of individual characteristics. He might be considered a reference pianist (maybe) but not a pianist of a reference recording.
Then I’m a tricycle!!!!! 🤣
sounds like a poor sales promoting a Camry using a Rolls-Royce picture
There are two areas where I think he is almost unsurpassed (I say "almost" because I do not know every recording ever made of anything, unlike some people I could mention!) and those are the Mozart concertos with Marriner (very honourable mention indeed to Perahia) and the Schubert sonata set. The one from the 70s on Philips, remastered by Eloquence into a set that is perfection to my ears, with the one tiny drawback in that he was adamant that first movement exposition repeats should be ignored. Other will think that is a plus.
After the 70s, he started plaing like a professor:
- Did you notice how I did this?
- See how I make that point?
It became mannered in its insistence on being didactic, agogic.
This is why I prefer his Vox Beethoven piano cycle over all the later ones as well. It was natural. It just worked. It let the music speak. All that became less and less as his career progressed. He remained one of the great pianists - no question - but once the 80s had arrived, he was no longer much to my taste. BUT HE PLAYED THE WEBER CONCERT PIECE FREQUENTLY! That should count for something!
I have not delved into his Liszt, for the bad reason that I expected it to be not for me. I admit freely that that's not right. Then again, I do not need much Liszt in my life, and Arrau is all I want.
During a dinner party at our home a number of years ago, a friend who happens to be an active, classical pianist came out of our listening room and remarked on the number of Brendel recordings we had. "He's a cold s.o.b.," our pal said, "Both in his tone and in his person." We had become accustomed to his critiques of pianists we loved--e.g., Uchida was "a real snob," etc. So, I'm not sure that Brendel excited a lot of respect and/or admiration from his peers. We continue to listen to his Schumann and Beethoven because of the fierce intelligence he brought to the work.
Any pianist that devotes their life to Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven & Schubert is a friend of mine.
Given your estimation of his sound as flinty, unalluring etc., which I don't disagree with, the question is not why is Brendel currently unappreciated but why he was ever Phillips' It guy in this music in the first place?
I think you are right that any artist who re-records the same repertoire in similar performances will struggle to make reference recordings. This also besets Karajan.
Beyond that, Brendel is divisive. Gramophone may have revered him, but he claimed the hostile German critic Joachim Kaiser held his career back in the German-speaking world by a decade. The merit of a reference recording must be a matter of near-consensus, in contrast.
Perhaps Brendel also suffered from arriving at a time when a good many reference recordings already existed, such as Schnabel's Beethoven and Cortot's Chopin. Moreover, there were probably a dozen top pianists recording great parts of the repertoire during his Phillips career. The issue was more one of choosing a favourite than having a single library choice. Schubert was perhaps the composer where he could stake a claim to a unique achievement.
To make a great piano recording you need a great pianist on form and a fairly simple recording setup. A great opera recording depends on a happy constellation of singers, conductor, orchestra and recording engineers: total successes are rarer and stand out more. Perhaps true reference recordings of the piano repertoire will be rarer and their status more controversial.
My first exposure to Brendel was through his VOX Turnabout LPs. I really liked those recordings, especially the Mozart piano concertos. Strangely, Brendel has disavowed them.
Good topic. My own puzzlement these days revolves around why PERAHIA is the top result for so many search engines (Apple Music, etc.). Is he married to some search engine wizard in Silicon Valley? Somehow, he's what everyone thinks I want to hear when I search for a certain range of classical piano music.
Never could get excited about Brendel, except maybe a couple of unusual things like Liszt's Malediction and the transcription of Weber's Oberon Overture. Heard him do a couple of LvB concertos at the Hollywood Bowl, not memorable. Good, solid mid-20th Century pianism, but I'm a Golden Age enthusiast and much recorded from roughly the 50's and later strikes me as competent but not especially enthralling. I could add many names to the list, at the risk of arousing the the ire and nasty dismissal of their cultists, both on the podium and at the keyboard.
On the other hand(s), I've been a big admirer of Arrau, and heard him do some wonderful things in a couple of recitals. One of the best Appassionatas and Chopin 1st Scherzos ever.......and Les Jeux......(Liszt) that was like a long, arching aria. In his later recordings he could sound too reserved and kind of fragmented, and he had a funny way with big chords at times, as if he was skittish about making a really big, orchestral sound. I spoke with him for about a minute after a recital and suggested that he might record some Busoni, who was the reigning piano monarch in Berlin during Arrau's youth.
Ive listened to many of the recent big names and found them glossy and superficial and 6 months ago I found Alf , finally a real pianist.
Sometime in the mid 1990’s I heard Brendel play Beethoven Op. 110, No 31 and Schumann Symphonic Etudes live at Carnegie Hall. I was familiar with the Beethoven. I had heard recordings by Myra Hess, Pollini and a few others. I must say, Brendel did not have the magnificent tone or warmth of Myra Hess. I remember thinking that. I think that goes to the point. Brendel lacks a bit of emotional depth in his performances (even in Haydn) and so his recordings never endear you like those of others. However, Brendel absolutely matched the technical brilliance of Pollini, which was impressive, because that’s not an easy piece to pull off especially the final fugue. Of course, I was lucky to hear the music live, so I was thrilled.
The only Brendel that I have is his Beethoven Piano Concerto cycle on Vox. It's not like I never heard of him, because he's a familiar name. At least for me, I think I have my "core" group of pianists and tend to stick with them: Buchbinder, Gilels, Perahia, Kempf, Pollini, Tharaud. I just never really listened to him.
Alfred Brendel is one of my favorite pianists. It was his Brahms Op.15 with Carlo Maria Giullini that introduced me to the piece. I have one of his complete Beethoven sonata recordings. I do recognize that there is little talk about him, as well as other pianists whom I revere. Brendel is a very thoughtful and intelligent man, as one concert pianist told me, once long ago. I appreciate his approach to the Beethoven sonatas, and his overall dedication to the integrity of the repertoire. I have heard a subsequent recording of the Brahms Op. 15 of Brendel's, which I did not like as much as the Giulini offering. Overall, I do like him a great deal.
**Addendum, it was Alexis Weissenberg and Giulini recording of Brahms that I owned, not Brendel. Faulty memory, sorry. My remarks about Brendel stand, however. I am now listening to his Beethoven concerto recordings with Bernard Haitink and the London Philharmonic. They are very pure to me, and allow Beethoven's music room to breathe and speak.
I agree with David and respectfully disagree with Jeremy Berman. I bought Brendel’s Beethoven sonata cycle recorded in the 90s. At that time, I was very enthusiastic about it, but I started to lose interest in his 'brittle' tone not long after. Soon, Gilels and Richter's passionate interpretations of Beethoven started to capture my attention, and over time, I concluded that if I wanted to listen to a Germanic or Austrian Beethoven, it's better to stick with Kempff or Backhaus. Listening to Brendel would only make sense if Kempff didn’t exist, I thought. Besides, Arrau’s Beethoven has so much more personality than Brendel’s. I started to think that Brendel's success might not have been due to his musical virtues, but rather his intellectual persona - a man who writes with great technical knowledge and has strong opinions, a friend of Isaiah Berlin and who was the first husband of Ronald Dworkin’s Wife. With his scholarly appearance, I thought Decca would have good visual material to promote his pianism. But recently, I decided to listen to various renditions of the Moonlight Sonata. Such a worn-out tune... Richter never recorded it! The competition in this sonata is monstrous. But suddenly, it occurred to me that, to me, Brendel’s version won over all others. This is a hell of a feat. And I started to reconcile with him, and I have been enjoying his Mozart recordings from the 60s... His reputation is not so unwarranted, but it is easier to remember all the other great pianists whose technique was refined with the Romantics, with whom Brendel doesn’t spend much time.
My general feeling is that with Brendel somewhat epitomises the classical sensibility of restraint, rationality and containedness. As such, while it is possible to admire what he has achieved, something of the raw expressiveness/inherent romance of music is lost and that for me is essential to music being ‘alive’, or else it is anaemic.
The late, great New York City restaurant critic Seymour Britchky, in his ratings list, included one category called “Good (but not _as_ good)”. I think Brendel is often perceived as having fallen into that slot. 😎🎹