Writing with superb authority, Alfred Brendel once answered his own rhetorical question. ‘What is piano playing of genius? Playing which is at once correct and bold. Its correctness tells us that is how it has to be. Its boldness presents us with a surprising and overwhelming realisation: what we had thought impossible becomes true.’ Setting his penetrating eye on his own favourite pianists (Edwin Fischer, Cortot, Kempff etc.), Brendel provided a flawless verbal image of his own playing. Heard at his greatest, as in these Vox and Regis reissues of recordings dating from 1955-67, he makes criticism fall silent. Wherever you turn, you will not hear a dishonest note or phrase, anything less than profoundly considered. Even Prokofiev’s Fifth Concerto, music Brendel despises and which he recorded when his career was still not fully launched, comes up fresh, its extravagance illuminated by a pin-point wit and delicacy rather than a more familiar aggression.
True, most great artists regard their early recordings with suspicion. Yet even Brendel, with his intimidating scrutiny, must have periodically delighted in his early candour and assurance, his effortless resolving of complexity into simplicity, in the absolute ‘rightness’ of his interpretations and their untrammelled virtuosity. His later work for Philips may be more speculative but his early freshness, even sang-froid, is something to marvel at. Here, he wears his profound insights with the lightest of touches. Thought-provoking and personal to the last, his performance of Mozart’s final Concerto captures exactly music of a clouded radiance with a momentary burst of anger at 3'22 in the finale, a ‘do not go gentle into that good night’ reminder of Mozart’s lack of resignation. The selection, too, of Beethoven’s Sonatas abounds with unselfconscious slants and angles unknown to lesser artists. Brendel is grave but never ponderous in the central adagio of Op 31 No 2 (not Op 21 as the booklet declares), finds a dazzling reconciliation between seemingly unreconcilable elements (dolce and vivace) at the start of Op 109, and shows an uninhibited joy in every surprise the composer offers in Op 81a. On the other hand you will rarely hear a more internal or communing performance of Schubert’s Wanderer, almost as if Brendel is telling us that such outwardly uncharacteristic music hardly goes against the grain but remains an organic part of Schubert’s oeuvre. In Liszt’s Cantique d’amour you can sense him caught in the breathless central elaboration, yet he never allows his playing to degenerate into either a salon, conversational elegance or flashy rhetoric. His inwardness, too, in the central blessing of the ‘Benediction’ is a marvel of poetic insight.
Brendel’s Schubert Impromptus are no less enviably uncluttered, played with a beguiling directness that is at the same time richly inclusive. Such playing easily survives both Vox’s notoriously recessed and unfocused sound and two American essays contained in the booklet that are respectively verbose and waggish. Brendel may be celebrated for his intellectual probity, yet, as these memorable albums show, his warmth and humanity are supported by an unfaultering virtuosity. Here, surely, is an incomparable marriage of heart and mind