Pianist Brendel 'takes back' Beethoven

CONCERT REVIEW: In the Piano Concerto No. 3, Alfred Brendel played with the toughness and beauty of someone committing a moral act.

By Larry Fuchsberg and

LARRY FUCHSBERG

For the Minnesota Star Tribune
March 8, 2008 at 1:23AM
Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel performs at the piano with the dutch Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest orchestra at the Lucerne Festival, on Tuesday September 5, 2006 in Lucerne. (KEYSTONE/Urs Flueeler) Der Pianist Alfred Brendel bei seinem Konzert mit dem Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest unter der Leitung von Mariss Jansons anllaesslich der Lucerne Festival vom Dienstag 5.September 2006 im KKL in Luzern.
Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel performs at the piano with the dutch Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest orchestra at the Lucerne Festival, on Tuesday September 5, 2006 in Lucerne. (Key/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Alfred Brendel isn't the sort of performer to announce a farewell tour -- or a string of them. But the 77-year-old pianist, after a 60-year career of rare distinction, will retire from the concert stage in December, and his local appearances this week, with the Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä, were presumably his last. The moment invites reflection.

Brendel, who is Austrian, began his career amid the rubble of postwar Europe. The Nazis, for their own ends, had appropriated -- or, less politely, raped -- the great Austro-German musical tradition, Beethoven above all. The music had to be taken back, cleansed, reconsecrated -- much as the German writers of Brendel's generation had to reclaim the language of Goethe from the clutches of Goebbels.

This is the soil in which Brendel's art first grew. The intense scrupulousness that has long characterized his music-making and that seemed undiminished Thursday evening, is not, I think, the "intellectualism" (or pedantry) it has sometimes been taken for. It is the diffident toughness of a man made wary by the recent past -- a man for whom playing the piano is not an Olympic sport but a moral act.

Brendel's magisterial performance of Beethoven's C-minor Piano Concerto, a work he's recorded no fewer than four times, had a hard-won directness. Better than almost anyone, he conveys Beethoven's mercurial counterpoint of moods.

His wonderfully round tone, especially welcome in the tranquil Largo, has not deserted him. The house of music has room for more flamboyant players, but it will always need the probity that Brendel incarnates.

We are all in his debt -- a point made eloquently by Thursday's audience, which recalled him repeatedly.

Dmitri Shostakovich's three-movement Symphony No. 6 (1939) -- the second Shostakovich symphony heard here in as many weeks -- is one of his more enigmatic works, hard to see whole. Vänskä, without presuming to solve the riddle, made the piece his own. The dark, Mahler-haunted spaciousness of the Largo was riveting; the boisterous sarcasms of the Allegro and the frenetic flippancy of the Presto (taken at breakneck speed) had a nightmarish vividness. Shostakovich seems to bring out the best in this orchestra. How about programming some of his later symphonies (particularly Nos. 13-15)?

The concert opened with a thoroughly stunning account of Anton von Webern's remarkable Op. 1, the epoch-straddling Passacaglia of 1908.

Larry Fuchsberg is a Minneapolis writer.

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Larry Fuchsberg

LARRY FUCHSBERG