Alfred Brendel & Mozart

No. 396 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages is this week's Friday Blog and Podcast. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast396

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Our new montage this week features pianist Alfred Brendel in three works by Mozart – his piano sonata no 14, and concerti 11 and 21.As we near the end of our ongoing series of montages, I don’t believe we have shared any tracks featuring Brendel – certainly haven’t made him the central artist in any of them, unlike other pianists. Time to fix that!

Born in what is now the Czech Republic to a non-musical family, Brendel and his family moved afew times before settling in Graz, Austria, where he studied piano with Ludovica von Kaan at the Graz Conservatory and composition with Artur Michel. Towards the end of World War II, the 14-year-old Brendel was sent back to then-Yugoslavia to dig trenches. After the war, he never continued formal training as a pianist and was largely self-taught after the age of 16. In many ways, I think Brendel’s musical training missors that of Sviatoslav Richter.

At age 17 (no less!), Brendel gave his first public recital in Graz which he called at the "The Fugue in Piano Literature" featuring fugues by Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms and Franz Liszt, as well as his own. In 1949 he won fourth prize in the Ferruccio Busoni Piano Competition in Bolzano, Italy. He then toured throughout Europe and Latin America, slowly building his career and participating in a few masterclasses of Paul Baumgartner, Eduard Steuermann and Edwin Fischer.

Some sixty-five years later, Brendel is recognized as a premier interpreter of the german piano repertoire and has played relatively few 20th century works but has performed Arnold Schoenberg's Piano Concerto. He was the first performer to record the complete solo piano works of Beethoven. He has also recorded works by Liszt, Brahms (including Brahms' concertos), Robert Schumann and particularly Franz Schubert.

Brendel's playing is sometimes described as being "cerebral", and he has said that he believes the primary job of the pianist is to respect the composer's wishes without showing off himself, or adding his own spin on the music: "I am responsible to the composer, and particularly to the piece". Brendel cites, in addition to his mentor and teacher Edwin Fischer, pianists Alfred Cortot, Wilhelm Kempff, and the conductors Bruno Walter and Wilhelm Furtwängler as particular influences on his musical development.

In November 2007 Brendel announced that he would retire from the concert platform after his concert of 18 December 2008 in Vienna. His final concert in New York was at Carnegie Hall on 20 February 2008, with works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.

An important collection of Alfred Brendel is the complete Mozart piano concertos recorded with Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields;the two concerti featured today are from that seminal cycle.

I think you will love this music too.