Thursday, 11.6.08, 6:00 am
Alfred Brendel’s Good-Bye in C-Minor
Alfred Brendel has been on stage for 60 years – beginning with a 1948 recital of “The Fugue in Music” and ending his concertizing career with two performances of Mozart’s E-flat concerto No.9 on December 17th and 18th in Vienna. A WPAS organized recital on March 17th of this year was the last time he played in Washington. Last Wednesday and Thursday his 13th-to-last stop en route to permanently closing the lid was Munich, where Christian Thielemann and the Munich Philharmonic accompanied him in Mozart’s c-minor concerto.
Framed by Beethoven (a brilliant Coriolan Overture and a fine, dynamic “Pastorale”), Brendel delivered Mozart in the manner that has made him one of the foremost interpreters of the Viennese Classics: Music from the heart, not the fingers. And few pianists have more heart for Mozart than Brendel. The warm geniality of his touch, his casual yet sincere way with the notes, is what has made Alfred Brendel such an unlikely superstar of classical music.
His opening notes in the Munich concerto were halting, as if acknowledging that these would be some of his last sounds emitted from the piano in Germany. But even if this was good-bye, ‘c-minor’ was not sad with Brendel, it was serious and collected. The separation of notes in the cadenza made the ears perk, and his skilled simplicity, his serious ease and dry wit (well hidden) made the ears smile. Because of who he is, how he plays, and what we know him to be, his whole persona, not just the naked notes, determines the impression he makes in concert. Perhaps that’s one reason why this listener finds him a good deal more appealing live than on record.
His performances were never special because of pianistic infallibility but the humanist touch he endowed every note with. What we got in the musician Brendel was the simultaneously serious and comic, the orderly and the absurd. “Chaos, in a work of art, should shimmer through the veil of order” (Novalis) was one of his favorite quotes. With Brendel you saw that veil on stage, in his playing you heard what was going on behind it: the machinations of joyous re-recreation at every turn of a phrase.
Softly, tenderly, wistfully he parted with an encore of Schubert’s op.142/3 Impromptu. How good to have had one more opportunity to hear him at his best.
Recommended recordings:
