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 targeted on the classics, has died. A press release 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 referred to as a performer who fused a eager intelligence with musical readability. Different gamers had been flashier; different gamers had 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 baby prodigy. My mother and father weren’t musicians — there was no music in the home. I’ve a superb reminiscence, however not an outstanding one. I am not a superb sight reader. I am utterly at a loss to clarify why I made it!”
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Brendel was extensively 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 a bit bit over-scholastic. However there are others who actually felt that this was a very first-class musical mind, engaged on a few of 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 lodge 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 recognized 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 straightforward, or did see the complexity and located it too troublesome.
“Once you play the sonatas,” he instructed NPR in 2004, “you might be on their own. And there are comparatively few notes that it’s important to play. And each single one in all these notes lays naked. It’s a delicate steadiness between poise and seemingly informal supply, which is critical.”
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He was the primary pianist to document 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 instructed NPR, “I really feel that one ought to keep up a correspondence 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 recognized for his wit — a lecture he gave at Cambridge, England, in 1984 was titled “Does Classical Music Need to Be Completely Severe?” — which prolonged to a passion for Dadaist artwork and a set 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 return.