Alfred Brendel: The Farewell Concerts = MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat Major, K. 271 “Jeunehomme”; Piano Sonata No. 15 in F Major, K. 533/494; HAYDN: Andante and Variations in F Minor; BEETHOVEN: Piano Sonata No. 13 in E-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 1; Bagatelle in G-flat Major, Op. 33, No. 4; SCHUBERT: Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960; Impromptu in G-flat Major, D. 899, No. 3; BACH: Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland (arr. Busoni) – Vienna Philharmonic/Sir Charles Mackerras/Alfred Brendel, piano – Decca 478 2116 (2 CDs) TT: 141:09 [Distr. by Universal] ****:
It seems that pianist Alfred Brendel (b. 1931) has always been with us, despite the fact that his name came to the American mind in the mid-1950s with the advent of some exciting inscriptions for Vox recordings. Brendel felt that halting his long and fruitful career in December 2008 made an intelligent peroration without detracting from his own musical image, that his powers remained intact. The Mozart Piano Concerto of 18 December 2008 maintains the refined delicacy and fluidity of approach that so often marks Brendel’s Mozart, crystalline and spirited. It is with a sense of resigned worship that we anticipate his playing of the cadenzas in this concerto, his concise but articulate statements in the solo of what magical intertwining with the orchestra had already achieved. The mystical C Minor Andantino, a breathed recitativo, seems to call on spiritual reserves in the Vienna Philharmonic to plumb the depths of staid melancholy. Conductor Charles Mackerras, though employing a full complement of players, is careful to modulate the “period” sound to intimate something of the Mozart balance of forces, especially between the woodwinds and the keyboard. Pearly play and resonant bravura mark the final Rondeau movement with its 70-bar minuet insertion, an opportunity for Brendel to inject some unwonted warmth into his often cool objectivity. Like Paderewski and Dohnanyi before him, Brendel respects the 1793 Andante and Variations in F Minor of Haydn, a set of double-theme and variants that seems to be based on an aria celebrating Orpheus’ loss of Eurydice, answered by a theme in F Major. The affect of inconsolable misery becomes translated through a series of galant gestures into filigree of a most rarified aether, and Brendel’s trill assumes a plastic capacity for innocence and melancholy at once. Some nine minutes into this chromatically engaging work, Haydn inserts a free-form cadenza that gains in emotional intensity, only to resolve itself into a haunted dew.
Mozart’s F Major Sonata (1788) basks in confident counterpoint in its first two movements, finding a happy balance in the two hands. The brilliance of the first movement Allegro often verges on concerto fioritura, a kind of “Italian Concerto” by Mozart. Many of the musical strands enjoy that seamless interweaving we do in fact associate with Bach, a composer Mozart “discovered” in the late 1780’s and on whose work he invested his own fugal solutions. The massive Andante exploits daring harmonic shifts and jumps, moving to a middle section whose double counterpoint warrants comparison with the best moments of the Jupiter Symphony. Brendel plays cleanly but perhaps a bit academically. The music-box Rondo, composed two years prior – complete with cadenza, is a lovely clockwork, the music dancing in glittering fashion, rife with Viennese charm and inventive colorful grace.
From the Hanover recital (14 December 2008) Beethoven’s first “sonata quasi fantasia,” Op. 27, No. 1 (1802) exerts a series of five disparate moods, from lulling song to rural dance to wild nocturne to a final catapult of stormy energy. The fourth section contains a lovely deep song that contrasts immediately with the Allegro molto e vivace storm that precedes it. Brendel urges a hybrid between staccato and legato for the second movement, whose middle section does convey a rustic charm. The spirit of the Bach sons–C.P.E. Bach, mostly–seems nigh, especially in the emotional phraseology of the Adagio, which could be kin to the C Minor “Pathetique” Sonata. Indicating no break to the agitated last movement, the music seems to gather in its nervous impulses to swell in mighty, contrapuntal throes. The return to the opening chords invites that cyclic idea that freedom for Beethoven is simply a stunning variation of a given form.
The Schubert B-flat Sonata (1828) receives not a brooding monolithic reading of weight and mass, but a lithe animated melancholy that accepts the tumultuous moments as a necessary consequence of its urge to compensation and even bliss. The C-sharp Minor development in Brendel’s concept clearly relates to the shape of the Andante sostenuto.
The lyric impulse reigns in Brendel’s realization of the opening movement, tears and smiles competing for hegemony. The wonderful stretti ring forth and then dissolve in a veil of liquid phrases, interrupted by the fateful trill. The rocking rhythm of the Andante almost suggests a rustic tango but the melancholy proves too much to bear, until the middle section in A Major whose choral ethos sustains a hymn of praise in the midst of personal anguish. For the sweetness of Brendel’s tonal palette and the softness of the phrase lengths, we likely must thank his old mentor, Edwin Fischer, especially as the final excursions into C and E Major reconcile time in all its manifestations.
Fluid, effervescent periods mark the impish Scherzo, whose Trio section offers a spirit of grudging contradiction to the motley feathers of the outer rings. The passionate Finale offers that unending series of lovely runs in the D Major section of the second theme, whose ternary form sings nostalgically before the darker F Minor sequence sets in. Brendel plays the long phrases for the Apollinian symmetry, the impulse to dance amidst the vale of tears, like Zorba after his little son died. Eighth notes and triplets compete for dominance, held together by a steady, tragic-comic pulse that occasionally descends to the edge of despair. Somehow Schubert finds grace even in ruins, and all ends well, proceeding from G to the vivacious coda that accepts pleasure and pain as components of an eternal mystery.
Brendel’s formal swan-song having concluded, he proffers three encores. Beethoven’s charming Bagatelle in A hints at the Viennese laendler as cross-fertilized by touches of an etude or syncopated invention. The exquisitely romantic G-flat Impromptu , with its broken triads and fluttering melody, has Brendel singing most directly, the few moments of shadow rippling in the stream with the haunted languor we find in the work of Corot. Brendel says adieu with a prayer, Bach’s stately grave Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland, a restrained martial meditation on the immanence of grace, the promise of salvation – musical and spiritual. The applause expresses 60 years of fruitful service.
–Gary Lemco
