Word: brendel
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With some 400 recordings of Beethoven's five piano concertos currently listed, even Ludwig's biggest fans must have trouble getting excited about new ones. Except when they are played by Alfred Brendel, an artist whose interpretive mastery of the composer continues to ripen. In his latest release, Beethoven: The 5 Piano Concertos (Philips Classics), Brendel teams with conductor Sir Simon Rattle and the Vienna Philharmonic in exhilarating performances that blend vitality, expressive breadth and, particularly in the five slow movements, spellbinding beauty...
...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...
...pianists to the golden 74 included here. The selection will not please everyone. Partisans and critics already want to know why their favorites were passed over: "Where is Stephen Kovacevich's incomparable Schubert?" asked Hilary Finch of the London Times. But the reputations of the represented artists--Paderewski, Horowitz, Brendel--are indisputable. "Of course, this was a subjective and somewhat personal exercise," says Deacon. "I'm not arguing that some of those excluded aren't great. We are only saying the ones we selected are unquestionably great...
...record and know instantly who's playing... Horowitz, Gilels, Serkin.... There are certainly pianists who can race down the keyboard at least as fast, and with more accuracy, but Horowitz had style. Who's the Horowitz today? Kissin maybe, but I can't really go there. Maybe Brendel, the more intellectual, is our Serkin. But I like to think I'm doing something different than what's been going on in concert halls for, say, the past 20 years
...come down to us. And some are known only to specialists. Among these are Heinrich Hermann Mebes (1842-?), whose tiny visionary-symbolist watercolors fall somewhere between Philipp Otto Runge and Persian miniatures; and Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern (1892-1982), with his fearsome moralizing fantasies; and the mental patient Karl Brendel (1871-1925), whose tiny, intense woodcarvings are so close in spirit to German Expressionist sculpture...