Pianist, poet and polymath, at once one of music’s most rigorous intellectuals and most mischievous minds – Alfred Brendel, who died in June, was an artist of fruitful contradictions. This marathon concert, on what would have been his 95th birthday, celebrated them with warm affection.
The music reflected Brendel’s own passions, skewing towards the classical repertoire. It began with Haydn’s Representation of Chaos from The Creation; but the evening’s punchlines came later. The orchestra, an ad hoc group of Brendel’s colleagues, proteges and friends, included leading orchestral and chamber musicians – and, in the case of Brett Dean, a composer reverting to his former viola-player persona. They were enthusiastically responsive to Simon Rattle’s conducting, leaning in to surges of sound or dropping back to the softest pianissimos.
Proceeds all went to the Alfred Brendel Young Musician’s Trust, which gives students access to professional-standard pianos. This was no pushy fundraiser, though, and a general lack of speeches made the atmosphere less reverential; the music really did do the talking. So, too, did the presence of so many pianists who counted Brendel as a mentor. Imogen Cooper joined the orchestra and soprano Lucy Crowe in Mozart’s aria Ch’io scordi di te …; later, Tim Horton duetted with Brendel’s cellist son Adrian in an intensely felt performance of Liszt’s Elégie No 2, and Till Fellner and Paul Lewis teamed up for Schubert’s A minor Allegro, D947.
There was (seemingly) unplanned humour: some ongoing shtick involving the six pianists and their several piano stools, which apparently aren’t as interchangeable as you might think; and a moment when we weren’t sure whether we were applauding the arrival on stage of András Schiff to play JS Bach or the return to his seat in the audience of the evening’s doughty page-turner – a familiar face to Brendel’s London fans. And the musical comedy mostly worked too: not so much the obscure piece for “three left hands” by Mauricio Kagel that briefly united Rattle, Horton and Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the piano, but Brendel would have been delighted that the sold-out audience fell so eagerly into the trap of Haydn’s false ending to the finale of his Symphony No 90, not once but twice. A sequence of Brendel’s own drily humorous poems, interspersed with miniatures by Kurtág and Ligeti, came off thanks to the contrast between Harriet Walter’s delivery and Aimard’s controlled silliness at the piano.
In surreal style, this sequence was bookended by a small military-style band – in scarlet coats, epaulettes and bearskin hats – playing two of Kagel’s Marches to Fall Short of Victory, shambolic in a very precisely written way. Perhaps it was equally, appropriately surreal that this flowed so well into the tense, tiptoeing darkness that opens Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 3, the final work, with a solo performance by Lewis full of weight and conviction.
For many, though, the evening’s highlight will have been the slow movement from Schubert’s C major Quintet, played by the Takács Quartet plus Adrian Brendel. It’s a piece in which there’s a sense that the melody is somehow missing, and it speaks sweetly but powerfully not only of absence, but of acceptance and thankfulness too. Here it said all those things eloquently, and more.
