Here is the complete text of my review of Sunday afternoon's recital. An edited version appears in today's Chicago Sun-Times.
Pianist Alfred Brendel has been before the public for so long -- sixty years to be exact -- that it is hard to recall not having heard him.
And Chicago, first at Grant Park in 1966, and then at Orchestra Hall from 1970, in both concerts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and in solo recital, has been a regular stop for the Austrian master on his annual international tours. So there are many, including this writer, who quite literally grew up with Brendel’s playing and had much of the central repertoire introduced to us by his performances.
Avoiding celebrity, eschewing flash on or offtsage, we sometimes think of Brendel as much for what he did not do as for what he did, such has been his reserve, his almost interior way of playing, the delicacy of his technique.
A gifted writer, speaker and comic poet, Brendel announced in November that 2008 would be his last year of playing the piano in public. Quitting the stage while still in great form -- a healthy, slender, and spirited 77 -- is just another example of how Brendel has always done just what he chooses to do.
For his final appearance in Chicago on Sunday he played key works of great subtlety by his four composer gods of classical Vienna -- Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Other pianists might probe these works for deep spirituality or emotion or tease out emphases of odd rhythms. Brendel instead plays them as he hears them and as he imagines that their authors themselves heard them -- clear expressions of direct lines, made mobile, regardless of complexity, by an animating, forward-moving spirit.
Could Haydn’s 1793 F minor Variations have danced more? Did Mozart’s F Major Sonata, K. 533/K. 494 of 1788 sound simpler than we thought it was? Did Beethoven’s 1801 E-flat Major Sonata, Op. 27, No. 1, “Quasi una fantasia,” sound more logical than a fantasy? Perhaps. But could one doubt the knowledge, the naturalness, the lifetime of turning technical difficulties into flowing lines and inevitable chords? No.
Even in Schubert’s great final sonata, the B-Flat Major, D. 960, from his last year, 1828, Brendel seemed to be saying, "Let others turn this into Sturm und Drang or act as if the music is transporting them. I want to give you Schubert qua Schubert."
Encores framed the Viennese with the slow movement from Bach’s 1735 Italian Concerto and a beautiful valedictory of “Au Lac De Wallenstadt,” revised 1855, ethereal music from the “Switzerland” volume of Liszt’s “Years of Pilgrimage,” music that Brendel has long owned.
What we admire most about Brendel was and is his demonstration that an artist can do things his own way, can trust his own instincts, meet his own standards, stick to his own beliefs, and still have a great success. Sixty years of constancy with no shadows of egotism, scandal, crisis, or pompousness. What a run.
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A postscript on place names:
While poking around things Brendel in the last few days, I noticed an error in his longtime publicity biography and wonder if it is just a long-running typographical error or if perhaps it is another example of AB's sly humor and love of wordplay.
The Colbert Artists Management, Inc. bio, reprinted in countless venue program books, says that the pianist was born "in Weissenberg, Moravia."
The only problem here is that there neither is nor was such a place.
There is, of course, a person named Weissenberg, Brendel's very-near contemporary and fellow pianist Alexis Weissenberg (left), who was also born in another multicultural part of the world, also then in Vienna's orbit, that knew much shifting about in the 20th century -- in Weissenberg's case, Sofia, Bulgaria.
Brendel was actually born in Wiesenberg, in the Desná Valley of the Jeseníky Mountains in Northern Moravia. In 1931 this was still a part of the first incarnation of Czechoslovakia (1918-1938), but there were some three million German-speaking people in the country then including those in Moravia and the region of Brendel's birthplace.
The Brendels soon moved on, of course, to another "temporary" country of shifting sands, Yugoslavia. World War II came, then the expulsion of the German speakers from the re-launched Czechoslovakia, Communism, its fall, the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. . . .
Wiesenberg, meanwhile, had a Czech-version of its name -- Viesenberk -- and then a more "fully Czech" name: Vízmberk. It is now known as Loučná nad Desnou -- "Loučná over the Desná" -- and it sits in the upper right-hand corner of the Czech Republic. Its main claim to fame, other than being in a setting of natural beauty popular with hikers, is that it is the birthplace of Alfred Brendel.
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