Sonata in E flat Hob XVI 49 - Haydn
Sonata in C minor K457 - Mozart
Adagio in B minor - Mozart
Sonata in A minor D845 - Schubert
Last May's AXA Dublin International Piano Competition left many a scarred 18th-century sonata in its wake. The finger-exercising perpetrators of so much damage to Mozart and Haydn would all benefit greatly if they could grasp some of the qualities which made Alfred Brendel's exploration of similar repertoire at the NCH on Tuesday so rewarding.
Within the tyranny of the chronological concert programme, it has become the unfortunate fate of Haydn to serve as a sort of warm-up. Brendel may have placed his Haydn at the start of the evening, but the notion of warm-up was nowhere in evidence. There's no prattle in his Haydn, and, rightly, he shows no concern to impose any redundant formal predictability on the writing. Haydn is one of those composers who suffers more than most at the hands of insensitive performers. He has little of the robustness of Beethoven or Brahms. But, equally, he blossoms when his strategies are accurately divined, his finely-balanced - or, indeed, sometimes imbalanced - inventiveness revealed. Brendel is a real master at drawing those distinctions between expectation and prediction which Haydn is so fond of playing with.
The Austrian's studio recordings of Haydn sometimes sound a little heavy, the tone rather too rich at the lower end of the piano. At the NCH, everything sounded both lighter and leaner. His performance of the less celebrated of the late E flat major sonatas was, tonally, a model of its kind, voiced and balanced to provide both fullness and transparency, while always remaining within the natural scale of the music itself.
On Tuesday, the two works by Mozart didn't show quite the same persuasive affinity between composer and performer. It was as if, in Haydn, Brendel dissolved. In Mozart, by contrast, he protruded. And then, in Schubert, he moved into a different, altogether more special realm. It's no exaggeration to say it was as if, whether in moments of strident assertiveness, melancholy introversion, or flights of filigree decoration, the very spirit of the composer were presiding.
It's not often a performer communicates so strongly the impression that, whatever he does, he can do no wrong. I recently came across the extravagant assertion that, among today's pianists, "Brendel owns Schubert". That's certainly how he made the last of the A minor sonatas sound on Tuesday. And the dark undercurrents of his sole encore, a hauntingly understated performance of the G flat Impromptu from D899, simply reinforced the impression.
