They’re billed as Alfred Brendel: The Farewell Concerts. And unlike Frank Sinatra, he means it. After 60 years of performing, his two concerts captured here — a recital in Hanover on December 14, 2008 (included complete), and a concert in Vienna four days later — are destined to remain his final acts as a public pianist.
So is this a worthy memento of a great artist? Definitely, though between pearls of wisdom the listener should prepare for some irritations, not all of Brendel’s making. Somehow, for instance, the Austrian Radio recording engineer managed to mislay the glow of the Vienna Musikverein acoustic, stripping away the surface sparkle from Mozart’s Jeunehomme Concerto (No 9), performed in the final concert with Sir Charles Mackerras and the Vienna Philharmonic. Beware, too, that in both concerts listeners must accommodate themselves to Brendel’s little groans as he reaches passages of tender pathos, executes an intricate twist of fingering or drifts into some particularly imaginative fantasy. Shades of Glenn Gould here.
That said, the CD set still presents Brendel the supreme artist. He probes and shapes his core repertory — Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Haydn — with enviable elegance and ease, and a heavenly lack of show. Recording apart, the youthful Mozart concerto is satisfyingly crisp, thoughtful too, though the rewards are greater in the solo Hanover recital. He begins with Haydn’s Variations in F: to some pianists perhaps just a pleasant warm-up. But Brendel takes his Haydn seriously, and the emotional delicacy brought to the music is exquisite. Pensive beauty equally characterises his Mozart slow movement (Sonata in F, K 533) and Schubert’s rolling andante in the B-flat major sonata, D 960.
Sometimes he may take understatement a little too far (the allegros in Beethoven’s Op 27 No 1). But an artist at the close of his public life has surely earned some Olympian calm. Quirks and all, these performances still represent the mature Brendel at something close to his best.
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What more could a punter ask for? Well, there’s always the final piece he played in Vienna, Liszt’s Swiss reminiscence, Au Lac de Wallenstadt — not included, presumably, because the performance became pockmarked by a chirrup from a mobile phone.
(Decca)