Since it is the critic’s job to pontificate, what does one do about a performance so satisfying that, after it, even a single well-honed sentence seems an irrelevance? Retire, possibly, and devote oneself to a more useful and benign trade such as growing vegetables.
So much, then for Brendel’s performance of the E major Sonata, Op. 109. But there is more here, “miles to go before I sleep” as the poet has it. Op. 111 is a brute of a thing interpretatively. Mismanaged, it can sound more like an imposition than a work of art. Fortunately, Brendel has always been one of its most lucid exponents (his early Vox recording, 8/63 – nla, was exceptional in its day), neither stalling the introduction, which he plays with a well-nigh ideal blend of grandeur and impetus, nor mismanaging the shifting pulses of the subsequent Allegro con brio ed appassionato.
Nowadays, he delivers the theme of the second movement less as an Arietta, more as an aria, more Adagio, less semplice. Schnabel is probably the ideal here (EMI, 7/91) and Brendel and Pollini both have something of his spirit; Pollini has the chaster tone, Brendel, in this latest recording, a more or less physically audible desire to search out and sing (on the keyboard) the mood of tragic pathos.
I have had some catching up to do with the cycle as a whole (earlier discs went elsewhere) but those volumes I have heard have struck me as being remarkable for the scale of the playing, its rhetorical daring and for the superb quality of the sound, as though Brendel, whilst further clarifying his already wonderfully lucid way with Beethoven’s contrapuntal detailing, has now added a new and finely balanced richness and weight of tone to what was there before. (The recordings reflect this superbly, but the sound itself is self-evidently Brendel’s own.)
Heard in this perspective, one can now see the 1970s LP cycle, Brendel’s second, as a productive transition. A new sound-world was being cultivated there; to continuing good effect in something like the opening movement of Op. 110 where the sense of a quiet song of thanksgiving was more marked than in the newest performance. In the newest performance the opening has a noble, grieving air that perhaps more openly anticipates the journey to come: the “Passion music” (Brendel’s phrase) of the great complex of movements – recitative, arioso and fugue – that makes up the sonata’s latter half.
Brendel plays the whole sonata superbly. Again, it is a ‘big’ sound but the sounding of recitative and arioso is masterly and the fugue is finely paced and elucidated both on its initial appearance and on the return over which Brendel and Charles Rosen had a robust debate in the letters column of the New York Review of Books some time ago. (Rosen, if I remember, eventually summoned Proust’s grandmother as a witness for the defence.) Brendel’s playing here is lucidity itself, the music “little by little getting back to life again” in a way that seems at once natural, moving, and true to the letter of Beethoven’s text.'