Word: brendel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Consistency is Caramanico's middle name, as she was selected as the Ivy League Rookie of the Year two years ago, and the Player of the Year as a sophomore, the first time this honor was given to a Penn player since Kirsten Brendel was selected...
...Brendel, 68, a longtime London resident of Austrian descent, has recorded works by composers from Bach to Schoenberg. His advocacy of Schubert's late sonatas and many of Liszt's once derided works is widely credited with enhancing the reputations of even these great composers. But it is to Beethoven's works that Brendel has returned most often. In the process he has become the most inspired interpreter of Beethoven's piano music since Artur Schnabel (1882-1951). In addition to the many concert cycles of the 32 sonatas he has played on both sides of the Atlantic, Brendel...
...Brendel's playing is distinguished by its heightened intellectual and emotional intensity, by his ability to energize details while sustaining taut lines, by his infallible grasp of musical architecture and by his extraordinary empathy with composers. His performances often achieve a sense of inevitability. Surely, a listener feels, this is what the composer intended...
...Classical period provenance of the concerto, when cadenzas were improvised, and play the cadenza with a near seamless bravura that is more suited to the concertos of the Romantic composers, thereby losing its sense of extemporaneous drama--and obscuring many of Beethoven's boldest, and funniest, inspirations. Not Brendel, whose subtle emphases, infinitesimal pauses and canny modulations of tempo, color and dynamics create an air of spontaneous adventure. He reclaims the cadenza's magnificent audacity and evokes Beethoven's imagination at its least inhibited...
...Brendel began taking piano lessons when he was six, but he was not a prodigy. He didn't have a steady teacher, or attend a prestigious music conservatory, or possess the kind of breathtaking technical virtuosity that instantly seduces listeners. "After my 16th birthday, I did not have a teacher," he says. "I only went to two or three master classes. So it was a slower development, but it was my own...I'm used to trying to find things out for myself...