Alfred Brendel
Dec. 6th, 2007 07:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtranAlfred Brendel is retiring from public performance.
His last concert will be in Dec 2008, which makes it pretty unlikely I will ever hear him perform live. Brendel is one of my favourite pianists, if not the favourite. I hope retiring from public performance doesn't also mean he's abandoned the Mozart piano sonatas he's been working though, or the concertos he's been revisting with the SCO.
I happened to be listening to a Brendel recording of K.595, the last piano concerto, just this week. This particular recording, with Neville Marriner and the ASMF is quite an amazing piece of art. Brendel brings out a valedictory air from the piece. A long farewell, a melancholy, but inevitable parting, with both smiles and tears. Listening to it again, it was amazing how moving it was with the knowledge that it was the last of the cycle.
What's interesting though, is that it's highly unlikely that this is what Mozart intended. At the time he wrote it, he had no idea it would be his last. If anything, it was more likely an attempt to win back the fickle Viennese audience and to recover the popularity of his earlier concerts. I've heard Brendel's more recent take on the same piece is a much more forward-looking reading. That's one of the reasons Brendel is so compelling as an artist. He doesn't twist the music into something that it isn't, but finds depths that were in there all along. And then he comes back again and finds other things to draw out.
His last concert will be in Dec 2008, which makes it pretty unlikely I will ever hear him perform live. Brendel is one of my favourite pianists, if not the favourite. I hope retiring from public performance doesn't also mean he's abandoned the Mozart piano sonatas he's been working though, or the concertos he's been revisting with the SCO.
I happened to be listening to a Brendel recording of K.595, the last piano concerto, just this week. This particular recording, with Neville Marriner and the ASMF is quite an amazing piece of art. Brendel brings out a valedictory air from the piece. A long farewell, a melancholy, but inevitable parting, with both smiles and tears. Listening to it again, it was amazing how moving it was with the knowledge that it was the last of the cycle.
What's interesting though, is that it's highly unlikely that this is what Mozart intended. At the time he wrote it, he had no idea it would be his last. If anything, it was more likely an attempt to win back the fickle Viennese audience and to recover the popularity of his earlier concerts. I've heard Brendel's more recent take on the same piece is a much more forward-looking reading. That's one of the reasons Brendel is so compelling as an artist. He doesn't twist the music into something that it isn't, but finds depths that were in there all along. And then he comes back again and finds other things to draw out.
