Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel on the piano, circa 1970. He died Tuesday at his dwelling in London at age 94.
Erich Auerbach/Getty Photographs
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Erich Auerbach/Getty Photographs
Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel on the piano, circa 1970. He died Tuesday at his dwelling in London at age 94.
Erich Auerbach/Getty Photographs
Alfred Brendel, the considerate Austrian pianist who centered on the classics, has died. An announcement from his consultant stated that Brendel handed peacefully on Tuesday morning at his dwelling in London, surrounded by his household. He was 94.
Praised by The Boston Globe as “one of many defining performers of our age,” Brendel was greatest often called a performer who fused a eager intelligence with musical readability. Different gamers have been flashier; different gamers have been, maybe, extra outwardly passionate. However Brendel had legions of ardent admirers.
Even Brendel himself confessed to documentary filmmaker Mark Kidel, who profiled him in 2000, that he discovered his success one thing of a thriller. “My profession is atypical,” Brendel stated. “I’ve not been a toddler prodigy. My mother and father weren’t musicians — there was no music in the home. I’ve a very good reminiscence, however not an exceptional one. I am not a very good sight reader. I am fully at a loss to elucidate why I made it!”
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Brendel was broadly praised for his cerebral, lucid piano taking part in. However Tim Web page, a Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic, says his taking part in wasn’t for everybody’s tastes.
“Some folks discovered him dry,” Web page notes. “Some folks discovered him maybe somewhat bit over-scholastic. However there are others who actually felt that this was a extremely first-class musical mind, engaged on among the nice music within the repertory.”
Alfred Brendel was born in Wiesenberg, in what’s now the Czech Republic, on Jan. 5, 1931. He had a peripatetic childhood, spending his early years in what was then Yugoslavia in addition to Austria, because the household adopted his father round to jobs as an architectural engineer, a businessman, a resort resort supervisor and director of an area cinema.
Whereas Brendel had some formal coaching — together with a couple of years on the conservatory in Graz, Austria — he was largely self-taught. After an look in London within the Seventies, his worldwide star started to rise.
Brendel was greatest identified for his interpretations of the usual classical repertoire. Relating to Mozart, he stated many gamers shied away from the composer — both as a result of they did not see his work’s complexity and located it too simple, or did see the complexity and located it too troublesome.
“If you play the sonatas,” he informed NPR in 2004, “you might be on their lonesome. And there are comparatively few notes that it’s a must to play. And each single certainly one of these notes lays naked. It’s a delicate stability between poise and seemingly informal supply, which is critical.”
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He was the primary pianist to file the whole piano works of Beethoven, with three separate cycles of the 32 sonatas. “As a result of I’m not one of many pianists who learns a chunk, performs it and discards it,” he informed NPR, “I really feel that one ought to be in contact with these items that are actually value taking part in and stay with them by way of a lifetime.”
Brendel additionally wrote volumes of poetry and essays on music. He was identified for his wit — a lecture he gave at Cambridge, England, in 1984 was titled “Does Classical Music Need to Be Solely Severe?” — which prolonged to a keenness for Dadaist artwork and a group of kitsch objects.
Simply weeks earlier than his 78th birthday, Brendel retired from public efficiency, giving his final live performance on the gilded Musikverein in Vienna, taking part in a youthful but enigmatic piano concerto by Mozart and a solo piece by Liszt, one other of his favourite composers. Nonetheless, he remained busy, writing, portray and lecturing for years to come back.
