To mark Alfred Brendel’s 70th birthday, Philips has issued a number of retrospective recordings by the great pianist. Few performers ruminate upon music as deeply and cogently as Brendel does. A comparatively small area of the repertoire is suited to his deeply considered, highly intellectualized style, and in Brendel’s discography Schubert always has retained a special place. Bargain hunters already will have snapped up the Philips Duo set of Brendel’s recordings of the final triptych of Schubert piano sonatas–D.958, D.959, and D.960–but for those collectors wishing to complete their Brendel Schubert sonata discography, this new two-disc package features one work he has not recorded previously.
These live performances described by the pianist himself as “documents of chance”, recorded over the last four years at recitals in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Aldeburgh, and London, include Brendel’s first-ever recording of Schubert’s piano sonata in B major D.575. It’s among the most delectable of the earlier sonatas, though Brendel finds within this score greater muscularity and substance than did András Schiff in his Decca performance of 1992. Brendel’s new account puts you constantly in mind of the 1979 BBC recording (on its “Legends” label) by Sviatoslav Richter, though Brendel’s is the more concentrated and lucid view. He has recorded the G major sonata previously, of course, and the new version programmed here adds little to his earlier thoughts on the work.
Disc Two is devoted to the final two works of Schubert’s piano sonata output–D.959 in A major and D.960 in B-flat. There’s greater immediacy in the former; you sense the presence of the audience at a kind of subliminal level, as you, with them, join Brendel in a kind of collective unfolding of this work. The performance is technically less perfect than Brendel’s earlier studio accounts, but any minor shortcomings are more than compensated for by the epic sweep and intellectual control, with the slow movement in particular entering realms of expressivity that even Brendel rarely attains. Broadly similar comments apply to D.960, where you detect occasionally intrusive noises, but the performance itself is no less visionary nor valedictory than Brendel’s earlier recordings for Philips.
Though there are moments when Brendel makes this music sound startlingly original, this reading will appeal principally to those who value intellectual dissection over external effect. These aren’t all-sufficient performances, but they weren’t intended to be: they simply add a further dimension to one man’s lifelong experience of this music, and we should be grateful that he’s shared his latest thoughts on it with us.
