Alfred Brendel's Final Bow

Written By: David Roden on January 5th, 2009

Alfred Brendel (Photo: Philips Benjamin Ealovega)

Today (Monday 5 January) is pianist Alfred Brendel's 78th birthday. He will not celebrate by playing in public. It's official: Brendel has retired -- and in the view of many, at the height of his career. Last month, Brendel gave his final bow 90 miles and 60 years from where his career had begun.

Brendel was born in 1931 in what is now the Czech Republic. His family wasn't particularly musical. His father was an architect who gave up his profession to move to a resort area of Yugoslavia and run a hotel. The young Alfred amused guests by singing along to opera records on the hotel's phonograph.

From there the family moved to Zagreb to manage a cinema. There, at the age of 6, Alfred began taking piano -- more because it was the thing for kids to do than because his parents thought he had any particular talent.

Five years on, it was already clear that Alfred Brendel was no ordinary kid when it came to music.

The Brendels moved again, this time to Graz, Austria. Brendel continued his study at the Graz Academy of Music. He graduated in 1947. The following year he gave his first public recital in Graz, playing Bach, Brahms and Liszt. Brendel was only 17 years old.

He won a difficult and prestigious competition two years later, but that didn't fill seats at Brendel's performances. This was still the era of the showy virtuoso. Audiences flocked to see pianists who put on grand shows, and stamped the works they played with their own highly individual interpretations. That wasn't for Brendel. Instead, he saw himself as a conduit for the composer's musical intent.

It took decades, but finally the value of his approach as a "thinking pianist" gained him recognition and admiration. Over those years Brendel never gave up playing in public as Glenn Gould did -- far from it -- but he did find great rewards in making recordings.

Brendel was the first to record all of Beethoven's piano music (for Vox, in the early 1960s; many of these recordings, including the sonatas, are still available to this day). He revisited these works as his interpretations (and recording technology) matured. In the mid-1990s Brendel became the only pianist to record the complete piano works of Beethoven three times. Brendel is also highly regarded for his interpretations of Haydn and Mozart, and for his efforts in reawakening interest in the sonatas of Franz Schubert.

Brendel moved to London in 1972. Since then he's been more selective in his teaching, but four of his best pupils heard him play his last concert.

It was on the 18th of December (2008), not in London, but in Vienna's glittering Musikverein. Another noted Mozart interpreter, Sir Charles Mackerras, was there to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic as Brendel played a Mozart concerto.

Did he go out with the 27th, Mozart's last? Not on your life. Perhaps the 77 year old Brendel had a twinkle in his eye as he played the concerto Mozart composed as a 21 year old, the 9th, the one nicknamed "Jeunehomme" -- "The Young Man."

And when he had finished, Brendel smiled and gestured toward Kit Armstrong, Imogen Cooper, Till Fellner, and Paul Lewis -- his most noted students, all there in the Musikverein, there for his farewell. Perhaps he was saying to them, "Now it's your turn."

Microphones Back in Severance Hall

Written By: David Roden on January 11th, 2009

The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall (Photo: Richard Scheinin)

Unsettling news hit classical CD fans last week. For years the entire music industry has seen CD sales gradually trail off as music lovers finished replacing their LPs and interest shifted to instant-gratification music downloads. Through all this, classical CD sales have always held up better than most other genres'. But last year, it was classical's turn at the biggest sales hit -- 26 percent.

This has renewed the clamor from the doom-and-gloom pundits who've been predicting classical recording's imminent demise for years.

They're still wrong. With download sales growing, classical recording is far from dead.

What has happened, though, is that many of the major labels, saddled with debt from buying each other, no longer are willing to allow their classical divisions to run at a loss. Recording projects are fewer. Increasingly, producers are shying away from risky repertoire and high-cost artists.

Many major orchestras, particularly in the US, have found themselves without recording contracts. A few have foregone recording entirely. Others have forged relationships with small, independent record labels. Still others have taken matters into their own hands, recording their own concerts. They offer the recordings as (usually paid) downloads on their websites, and as CDs in their gift shops and by mail.

With so many large media companies leaving orchestras in the lurch, it was especially gratifying when one of the biggest, Deutsche Grammophon, released The Cleveland Orchestra's Beethoven Ninth in 2007. Now, DG's microphones are back in Severance Hall. They recorded this weekend's concerts (on 8 and 10 January 2009), with soprano Measha Brueggergosman singing Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, for a Wagner disc (yes, I said disc) to be released in the autumn of 2010. Robert Woods, the sharp ears behind Telarc Records, is part of the production team.

The Cleveland Orchestra's agreement with DG will give us four recordings in all. For the second release, Pierre Boulez, who has made several fine discs of French repertoire with The Cleveland Orchestra over the years, will conduct Ravel's G major concerto and left-hand concerto. The pianist will be Pierre-Laurent Aimard. These recordings, also live, will be made at next season's concerts.

Repertoire for the remaining two recordings hasn't yet been announced.

All four recordings are expected to be released both as CDs and as Internet downloads.

Music Articles And Life Enrichment

Articles Of Note | Music Article

Whether you admit it or not, music imbeds our daily life, weaving its beauty and emotion through our thoughts, activities and memories. So if you're interested in music theory, music appreciation, Beethoven, Mozart, or other composers, artists and performers, we hope you'll spend some time with here and learn from these music articles of note for all ages and tastes.

When I first started studying the history of music, I did not realize what I was getting into. I had thought that music history was somewhat of a trivial pursuit. In fact, I only took my history of classical music class because I needed the credits. I did not realize how completely fascinating music history is. You see, in our culture many of us do not really learn to understand music. For much of the world, music is a language, but for us it is something that we consumed passively. When I began to learn about the history of Western music, however, it changed all that for me. I have had some experience playing musical instruments, but I have never mastered one enough to really understand what music is all about. This class showed me.

When most of us think about the history of music, we think of the history of rock music. We assume that the history is simple because the music is simple. In fact, neither is the case. The history of music, whether you're talking about classical music, rock music, jazz music, or any other kind, is always complicated. New chord structures are introduced bringing with them new ways of understanding the world. New rhythmic patterns are introduced, bringing with them new ways of understanding time. And music reflects all of it.

Even when the class was over, I could not stop learning about the history of music. It had whetted my appetite, and I wanted more. I got all the music history books that I could find. I even began to research forms of music that had not interested me before in the hopes of enhancing my musical knowledge further. Although I was in school studying toward something very different – a degree in engineering – I had thought about giving it up and going back to get a degree in musicology. That is how much I am fascinated by the subject.

If you have never taken a course in the history of music, you don't know what you are missing out on. The radio will never sound the same to you again. Everything will seem much more rich, much more luminous, and much more important. A new song can reflect a new way of being, and a new way of imagining life in the world. This is what learning about the history of music means to many of us.

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Beds For All in Live Classical Concert: Good Idea?

Beds For All in Live Classical Concert: Good Idea? December 13, 2006

A mattress company in Tel Aviv decided to fill up a concert hall with 144 beds complete with pillows and blankets, giving music lovers the most comfortable way possible to listen to a classical music concert.

But this could backfire. We were just at classical music concert not long ago where the audience was sitting in traditional straight-back seats, and this one guy was snoring so loudly they just about had to stop the show. And that was a really exciting concert with spectacular performances by world-class virtuosos.

What would happen if they played Mahler? This bed/classical concert idea could easily erupt into a snorefest, unless all those zzz's could be written into the music as some sort of audience-participation performance-art piece. – Charlie White

Beds for audiences at a live concert [Spluch]

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Review/Concert; Pinnock and Old Music in New Context

LEAD: There must be something in the air and soil of England that nourishes an interest in old music - or early music, as it is nowadays known more euphemistically though no more precisely. A steady stream of specialists has been produced, beginning with Arnold Dolmetsch, the pioneering instrument builder, and becoming a flood in recent times with such students of the antique as David Munrow, Denis Stevens, Christopher Hogwood, John Eliot Gardiner and Roger Norrington.

There must be something in the air and soil of England that nourishes an interest in old music - or early music, as it is nowadays known more euphemistically though no more precisely. A steady stream of specialists has been produced, beginning with Arnold Dolmetsch, the pioneering instrument builder, and becoming a flood in recent times with such students of the antique as David Munrow, Denis Stevens, Christopher Hogwood, John Eliot Gardiner and Roger Norrington.

At least as successful as any of these leaders is Trevor Pinnock, a harpsichordist whose English Concert has been notably successful with recordings of Handel, Bach and Vivaldi. However, he appeared at Alice Tully Hall on Monday evening without his usual English colleagues, in a program labeled none too originally ''Trevor Pinnock and Friends.'' The friends were eight old-music experts with strong American credentials, among them the violinists Stanley Ritchie and Daniel Stepner.

Mr. Pinnock, presiding at the harpsichord, bypassed Handel this time but offered a large and appreciative audience a full plateful of the other two 18th-century masters. The five works, mostly staples of the old-music repertory, were played in a soft-edged, unassertive style that reminded one of their origins in a time before instrumental music had to speak to audiences of hundreds, let alone thousands. Like many other Baroque instruments, Christopher Krueger's wooden flute had moments of dubious pitch in Vivaldi's Concerto for Flute, Oboe, Violin, Bassoon and Continuo in D (R. 90), but its pastoral tones melded sweetly into the nine-instrument ensemble. Stephen Hammer's Baroque oboe, similarly, took its place pleasingly as first among equals in Vivaldi's Concerto for Oboe and Strings in C (R. 449). And Dennis Godburn's bassoon, after an unsteady start, crooned throatily and seductively in the same composer's Concerto in C (R. 472) - one of 39 concertos for the double-reed instrument that survive, as the program notes pointed out. Fourteen of the survivors are in C major alone.

Bach was responsibly served by Mr. Ritchie and Mr. Pinnock in the Sonata for Violin and Harpsichord in A (BMV 1015). Mr. Ritchie, the Australian-born violinist who helped found the Aston Magna center in Massachusetts for the study and performance of early music, took a scholarly rather than Romantically expressive approach to the score. Vibrato was used discreetly when at all, except on long-held notes, when it added a needed touch of tone color.

Mr. Ritchie also paired up in a concertino or soloist role with Mr. Stepner in Bach's ''Brandenburg'' Concerto No. 5, where the star part falls to the harpsichord. One revelation of historically aware performances such as this one is the prominence it allows the harpsichord, an instrument more easily seen than heard in most old-music concerts. The beautiful instrument played by Mr. Pinnock spoke up clearly, although authentically lacking pedals and other refinements built into many post-Baroque harpsichords. Because of the extraordinarily extended cadenza in the first movement - about two and a half minutes of keyboard fireworks that actually throw the movement out of proportion - the Fifth ''Brandenburg'' is the harpsichordist's ''Emperor'' Concerto. Mr. Pinnock, a solid player during most of the evening, made the most of his opportunity here, sailing into the cadenza with all virtuoso flags flying.

A note for the how-careers-are-made file: Followers of the Metropolitan Opera must wonder what qualifies Mr. Pinnock to conduct next season's ''Julius Caesar.'' The new Handel production will apparently be his first experience anywhere as an opera conductor. THE PROGRAM - TREVOR PINNOCK AND FRIENDS, Mr. Pinnock, harpsichordist; Christopher Krueger, flutist; Stephen Hammer, oboist; Dennis Godburn, bassoonist; Stanley Ritchie and Daniel Stepner, violinists; David Miller, violist; Myron Lutzke, cellist; Michael Willens, violone player. At Alice Tully Hall. Vivaldi Concerto for Flute, Oboe, Violin, Bassoon and Continuo in D (R. 90, ''Il Gardellino''); Concerto for Bassoon and Strings in C (R. 472); Concerto for Oboe and Strings in C (R. 449) Bach Sonata for Violin and Harpsichord in A (BWV 1015); ''Brandenburg'' Concerto No. 5 in D (BWV 1050)