Autumn Sonata

Pianist Alfred Brendel Caps a Stellar Career In Classic Fashion

Alfred Brendel, widely thought of as one of the greatest living classical pianists, values preparation -- in himself, and from others. Well before his final American tour -- which culminated last night in a sold-out and enthusiastically received recital at Strathmore that he says is his last public performance in this country -- he wanted to take care of all his interviews by phone from his home in London. And he wanted to know exactly what he would be asked. So in the course of our conversation last month, he responded to a simple question about career highlights with a detailed list of major events, written down in advance so that nothing would be left out.

This sort of thing only buttresses the commonly held image of Brendel, 77, whose concerts are supposed to be required listening for the musical intelligentsia, as dry, professorial and even pedantic. With thick glasses, rumpled salt-and-pepper hair pulled back from a high brow and a slightly stooped walk -- when he takes the stage, his evening coat is as rigid as the carapace of a large, rather worried-looking beetle -- his appearance certainly supports this image.

So does his repertory, which has come to focus primarily on the classical cornerstones of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. His performances are often described as ascetic, without virtuoso showmanship and focusing on keenly observed detail. Add to this his published writings -- academic essays on music and several volumes of poetry -- and you see the reason for Brendel's reputation.

But this image is wrong. He is actually quirky, impish, even impulsive. His poems, which he began publishing in the 1990s, are deliberately whimsical -- the most recent volume is titled, in its English version, "Cursing Bagels." The twinkle in his eye behind those thick glasses marks an inner dadaist waiting to get out. And if his performances, and his interview responses, are carefully planned, one senses that this planning is defensive. It's the response of the self-taught to a world that waits to pounce on the unprepared.

"There are lots of things I emphasize into minutest detail," Brendel says. "But the main thing I have learned early on is that you should get the information about the piece from the piece, and not inform it on the basis of what the piece should be like or what the composer should have written." In other words, there are limits to how far academic research can take you.

Brendel's whole approach to music is that of a maverick rather than a member of the establishment. Born in the Czech Republic and raised in Yugoslavia and Austria, he studied piano sporadically, was sent to dig trenches in Yugoslavia at the end of World War II, stopped regular formal study at 16 (his teacher, he said, released him, saying, "There is not much I can teach you now") and, at 17, wrote a sheaf of sonnets, opened an exhibition of his own watercolors and gave his first public recital, a challenging affair consisting exclusively of fugues by a number of Central European composers, including himself.

"It was a rather unorthodox musical upbringing," Brendel says, his characteristic deadpan delivery masking an equally characteristic fond amusement.

Brendel's repertory was not always focused on classical Vienna, although he won renown fairly early in his career as the first-ever pianist to record all 32 Beethoven sonatas (he has recorded the cycle twice since). His early recordings also included Busoni's challenging "Fantasia Contrappuntistica" and Schoenberg's Piano Concerto.

Equally striking is his long championship of the music of Franz Liszt, whose stereotype as a flashy attention-grabber is diametrically opposed to Brendel's own, but whom he calls "my greatest ancestor, in terms of exploring, exploiting the piano in the biggest possible way."

Brendel is also the first to admit his own limits, which have led him away from contemporary music and, of late, from Liszt as well.

"If you are a very brilliant sight reader, and have a very good memory outside of functional harmony, you can easily pursue" contemporary music, he says. "I am not these things. I am a very slow reader. I admire people who can."

And the aging process has taken a certain toll on his concertizing. Never known as a technical whiz -- not, at least, in this country -- he has gradually stopped performing the extremely demanding pieces, such as Beethoven's "Hammerklavier."

Brendel's playing tends to divide opinion. Even after he started winning recognition in Europe, critical response to him was mixed -- Harold Schonberg once referred to his "overstressed and ugly sound" -- and his career in the United States did not take off until the 1970s, when he was over 40. His fans hear poetry in his playing; his detractors complain of dryness. Brendel keeps himself out of the debate as he is said to keep himself out of the music, not even leaving a literal fingerprint on the keyboard -- he plays with bandaged fingers to protect against the splitting of a nail -- and ensconced in the safety of being well-prepared.

His playing last night was certainly not dry -- unless by "dry" one means an absence of the histrionics that signal a certain kind of virtuoso. Indeed, his Mozart and Haydn were positively effusive, in Mozartian terms. Brendel displayed Haydn's Variations in F Minor, a late piece, in a bouquet of quiet emotions. And Mozart's Sonata in F, K. 553/494 (an earlier Rondo was appended to two movements written two years later), was an object lesson in playing classical music on a modern concert grand: Neither too loud nor too tinkly, it was presented with a gentle suppleness that became, in the glorious slow movement, a poem of dignified restraint. The final Rondo, though audibly a relic of an earlier time, became a resigned look at the past, presented with a tolerant smile.

It was, in fact, the highlight of the evening. The Beethoven sonata, Op. 27, No. 1, marked "quasi una fantasia" and thus a kind of dream accompanying the "Moonlight" of its more famous partner (Op. 27, No. 2), was less involving. While he made much of its mercurial shifts of mood -- it is a piece that darts off in new directions with a sudden minnow-like flick of its tail -- Brendel's understated intensity did not sustain the arc of its Adagio.

If the first half of the program was intent on showing that there are still less-tilled corners of the repertory, the final piece was well-known: Schubert's great D. 960, a kind of valedictory. And Brendel's opening was ruminative, and pregnant with reined-in power; but technical slips began to mark the piece's flow. Still, no one seemed to want to concede that it was the end when the piece was over.