His was perhaps the most famous wrinkled brow in classical music, framing the bespectacled eyes of a pianist who penetrated to the very heart of the Austro-Germanic tradition like few others have ever done.
Now, following his death at the age of 94, Alfred Brendel leaves behind a peerless recording legacy and a style of intelligent, insightful, and, above all, lyrical piano playing that continues in the work of his successful students.
A peerless recording catalogue
Born in Moravia, now part of the Czech Republic, and spending his formative years mainly in Graz and Vienna, Alfred Brendel was destined to become a master of the Central European piano classics.
His discography on Vox, Decca and Philips among other major labels, says it all.
He recorded three sets of the Beethoven sonatas and concertos, two each of Schubert's later piano works and the Brahms concertos, one of the complete Mozart concertos, with plenty of Haydn, Liszt and Schumann thrown into the mix.
Building a formidable career out of a late musical start
A man of conspicuous intellectual acumen, Alfred Brendel's journey toward his stellar musical career was unusual, coming as he did from a not-especially-musical family and effectively having few real piano lessons beyond his mid-teens.
But his was an individual voice from the start, helped by an early interest in composition. At his professional recital debut at the age of 17 in Graz, he performed his own Piano Sonata which included a fearsome double fugue.
That youthful interest in composition informed his later piano playing, giving him what he called "musical understanding". It also helped him to establish his trademark desire to eschew personal glory in the interests of getting to the heart of what composers wanted and the music itself demanded.
Alfred Brendel's recording career began inauspiciously in the early 1950s, when he was handed a reel-to-reel tape recorder and asked to perform the Prokofiev Fifth Piano Concerto, which he didn't know, with a modestly-credentialed orchestra.
From then on, he became such a prodigious recording artist that modern listeners are still just as familiar with his sound as his contemporaries were.
A unique performance and teaching style
The Brendel piano style featured remarkable finesse, a majestic sense of control and penetrating intelligence, imparting a sense of definitiveness to his interpretations.
Just as with the man himself, some sensed a kind of aloof austerity in his performances, but both the man and the musician were far from that.
Filled with wide-eyed curiosity and with interests that went well beyond music (poetry, painting and philosophy were lifelong passions), Brendel was also an inspiring teacher.
Modern British pianist Paul Lewis who, along with Imogen Cooper, studied with Brendel, recalls: "Alfred was never interested in pianism for pianism's sake. For him, the piano was always a means to an end."
"In his own way he was very exacting as a teacher, but he was never interested in anything technical," Lewis says.
Brendel lived in North London during the second half of his life but never lost his Central European accent.
Having played in all the world's great concert halls and with all the major orchestras over a 60-year-plus career, he gave up performing on the professional concert stage in 2008.
Brendel continued to appear as a public-speaker, lecturer, and commentator. His writings on music have been justly lauded.
Married twice, he has four children, including cellist Adrian Brendel, co-founder of the Plush Music Festival in Dorset, where Alfred Brendel kept a country home.
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