It was a miserably dank autumn Sunday afternoon in London. And on that day in October 1962, a stern, bespectacled man called Alfred Brendel stomped on to the stage of the Wigmore Hall, bowed curtly to a miserably small audience and launched into a Beethoven recital. The bows remained curt throughout and, as I recall, there were no encores. The message was clear: ‘Go home’. We went. Today Brendel would fill this venue five times over. The attitude might be unaltered but his musicianship has changed radically. These reissues – many live recordings – celebrate the 75th birthday of an artist who didn’t try to be much loved; instead, he used his gifts of sharp intelligence and probing intellect to contribute significantly to the art of interpretation. There are more performances to come, including unpublished live recordings which Brendel says ‘are particularly dear to my heart’. These discs offer an opportunity for reassessment which has to begin with a re-appreciation of his finest virtue – ‘not to take things apart and show their components but to put them together, place them in perspective, and see the detail in the context of the whole’. Edwin Fischer taught the principle, Brendel retained it.

Brendel believes Schubert is ‘mysteriously episodic’, but doesn’t play him that way. Architecture is re-created by scanning ahead (first movement exposition repeats are omitted), and by binding movements together through tempi that relate to one another. Weaknesses fall by the wayside. Not, though, the melancholic songfulness that is an indisputable part of Schubert. It is heard in, say, the B major Trio or the slow movement of D960, but shorn of the lachrymose bleating that some pianists think necessary.

Indisputably, Brendel confronts, but not aggressively. He is positive, certain of his ground, every interpretation pondered and offered with no holds barred. Liszt’s Sonata is seen to have ‘an enlarged field of tension’ and here is a performance that, from a tension of expectancy in the dragged notes of the opening bars to the tensions of the bravura passages, is the epitome of breadth and dignity. Not meretricious but not cerebral either; and to that add ‘passionate’ in Kreisleriana and Fantasie, the climaxes of its finale gauged to a nicety.

In Haydn and Mozart and their fields of tension are gauged to a nicety, too. Brendel can be ‘picky’ and didactic in Mozart (example, the Sonata, K310) but here he is at home, and particularly so than in the Rondo, K511. Stated simply, a tremendous piece gets the performance it deserves. The Haydn Sonatas? Well, could we please have many more? The outdated pairing with Mozart is nowhere to be heard. Nor is the outdated image of amiable, periwigged Papa. Haydn is given is own voice. You cannot expect anything less from Alfred Brendel who rarely fails to make you listen, think and feel – as indeed he does. An elite musician.