After more than 50 years in music Alfred Brendel is still one of the greatest pianists. But he is also a realist, writes Michael Dervan.
The Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven that he will play on Saturday, at the National Concert Hall, are very much home territory for Alfred Brendel. But the Viennese classics are a far cry from the sort of music he was prepared to tackle in his youth. His first recital in Vienna consisted entirely of fugues, including one he wrote himself. And in March 1950, at the age of 19, he played his own Suite for Piano in a showcase concert for young Austrian composers.
In the recording studio he undertook the sort of virtuoso repertoire that seems difficult to square with his latter-day image, Stravinsky's Three Movements From Petrushka, Prokofiev's Fifth Concerto, Balakirev's Islamey. US record companies were using Vienna as a cheap recording location in the 1950s, and Brendel - ready, willing and able - was one of the beneficiaries. He recalls recording the Prokofiev.
"I was 21, already lived in Vienna, but I went to see my parents over Christmas in Graz [in southern Austria\]. Before Christmas I got a telegram from the Konzerthaus: 'Would you like to record Prokofiev's Fifth Concerto at the end of January?' I cabled back: 'Yes. Please send me the music.' " He had never played a note of Prokofiev before.
He was, he agrees, pretty fearless, "not reckless, but fearless. Some of these recordings are first performances, quite a few actually; also Beethoven's C minor Concerto, for instance, which is not that bad, I'd never played before. My Vox recording of the Diabelli Variations was also my first performance". Incredible as it may seem, this is also true of the notoriously challenging pieces by Stravinsky and Balakirev.
Although the 20th century may never have been particularly well represented in his concert programmes, he has always stayed in touch with new music as a listener, to the point of describing it as one of his non-pianistic musical enthusiasms. "I'm interested in what is new, and I've stored enough information to be able to assess what is new and what has been done before." He's on record as preferring "the company of literary figures, philosophers and artists to that of musicians", although he makes an exception for the creators of music.
"I particularly like to be with important composers of our time, and nothing could please me more than that they come to the concerts when I play older music. I have been very happy to know Harry Birtwistle. I think he's one of the greatest composers now and certainly the greatest musical dramatist of the last 20 years. I've played with Boulez quite a bit and know him well. I knew Berio. I visit Elliott Carter in New York whenever I can. I know Kurtág and sent my son a number of years back to study with him, which he has done on and off."
There's other musical company he enjoys also: that of conductors - "some of them have been great friends of mine". Yet, he adds: "I just prefer to get the stimulation from the other side. I'm very interested in the visual arts, and of course I have read all my life. And in a way this is more important to me, to find out what's going on there." This clarity applies also to his non-professional piano playing. His repertoire is rooted in the central European tradition, and he doesn't, for instance, sit at the piano with the music of Fauré or Debussy for private pleasure.
"If I have time I prefer to listen to Haydn quartets or Mozart operas any time in good performances, or Schubert lieder. Sometimes if there are new works like the Ligeti Études I try to get the music and see what can be done with it and tell young pianists: 'You have to learn some of those.' "
Brendel's creative pursuits extend beyond music. "I also have a literary life, which has expanded with everything. In the last 10 years or so I have spent quite a lot of time writing poems, and this goes on. There will be another selection at Faber in March. There has been [a volume of\] collected poems in German, \ about 200 of them. In French they are continuing [in translation\] until the whole lot is there. There have been 100 in Italian. That fascinates me more than anything. That was a new departure that I did not at all expect; it took me by surprise. But now I'm a little more seasoned than at the beginning."
"Absurd" is the way he describes his poetry, "because that seems to be my view of the world", and he had the pleasure of hearing three of his poems set for baritone and orchestra for his 70th birthday by Birtwistle, Adès and Berio.
He has never been a follower of musical fashions, and, with Saturday's late 18th- and early 19th-century Viennese programme in mind, I ask about his attitude to period instruments. He's not a fan of old pianos, although he has, naturally enough, explored them. But, he says: "I have learnt more from listening to these composers' orchestral, vocal and chamber music than from period keyboard instruments. I have learnt more from listening to and observing conductors and singers than from pianists.
"Piano music, I think, is a special proposition. The piano is a receptacle of all musical possibilities. They are reduced in a sort of piano-score fashion to give one player the chance to do the complete performance without having to compromise with other players. With the exception of Chopin, the great piano composers have not been piano specialists. I do not believe that piano music, with very few exceptions, is tailor-made for a certain brand or vintage of instrument. For me the piano is a device to produce a wealth of different sounds. It has to be transcended. It wants to play roles."
Taking a favourite example, he says: "Let's look at Mozart's A minor Sonata: the first movement is orchestral and symphonic, the second is an aria with a dramatic middle section and the third one is a piece for wind instruments. Several of Mozart's sonata movements derive their colour from the wind divertimento sound.
"I believe that all these latent possibilities of the music can be much better made manifest on a modern piano. The modern piano also allows much better cantabile playing than the fortepiano, which tends to be much too short in its upper half. For me cantabile is the essence of music and the essence of music I play." In the 20th century, he says, this changed: cantabile was no longer central.
There are, he concedes, a few things that modern pianos can't match. He instances "the ghostly soft pedal" of some early instruments and, with his tongue in his cheek, the drum and cymbal facilities built into experimental pianos in the early 19th century. "Otherwise," he says, "I think the gains are bigger than the losses." With the older music that he plays, "it has remained a criterion that in a masterpiece there is something new that has not been done before, that contributes to musical experience," he says. "And that those composers who follow the great masters in a very honourable way and water them down are for that matter not as great as the perhaps less perfect but permanently enigmatic composers who have done the new things.
"When I play my repertory I always try to see it in the context of the time, what has it contributed, what was so amazing about it in the first place. Now there are some performers today who say, 'Well, in my performances I want to make the music as amazing as it was then', and then do things that nobody would expect. This I think is nonsense. I'm sceptical about looking at older music through the lens of new music as much as I am sceptical of playing old music trying to block out what has happened since."
The condition of the modern pianos that a travelling pianist encounters is a matter of great concern. "I want to have an instrument where I can realise what I am doing, on which I play my own mistakes and not those of the instrument. I always try to have a good piano technician at hand, come early to the place and see how the piano needs to be adjusted. Because they all actually need it, for instance, to even out the sound.
"What I expect from a piano - and this should be the norm if there is any norm in this - is that the sound of the piano from top to bottom should be even in timbre, in dynamics and in the dynamic possibilities, not just in piano but also in forte and fortissimo. It should have a wide dynamic range; the soft pedal should be very carefully voiced, so that it is not just thin and grotesque but has a lyrical quality of considerable depth - very important for Schubert playing, of course, and much other music."
The dominance of the Steinway as a concert instrument, a phenomenon that has developed since the second World War, is not one that Brendel regards as ideal. "With all my admiration for Steinways and what they try to do in terms of quality, of course I would wish there would be three or four important firms, next to one another, who compete in a friendly manner and who have to offer . . . well, different basic things. I have been brought up with old Bechsteins, for instance. And there are certain qualities in the Bechstein that I still miss today, though I have adjusted myself to the Steinway."
When he used the Bechsteins, he points out, it was mostly in rooms and not in halls. In Vienna in the 1950s he played Bösendorfers almost exclusively, because no good Steinway was available. "That changed later. Also, the character of the Bösendorfers changed. It was a company in private hands, still very old-fashioned and very thorough in how they did things. But their output was very small, and it just didn't pay for itself. So an American company came in and wanted to rationalise matters, but also to change the character, which was a big mistake, I think."
Brendel is the antithesis of the PR-sensitive star who measures responses in terms of any possible antagonistic public response. He's not at all shy about lavishing praise - on the Scarlatti recordings by the harpsichordist and period-piano player Andreas Staier (although he has tried to persuade him over to the modern piano), the Monteverdi and Purcell performances conducted by William Christie or the singing of the Hilliard Ensemble. And he voices negative criticism as freely, pointing out that Glenn Gould "had no notion of character whatsoever". Gould, he says, "went to the studio, played the piece in one mode, then in a very different mode, then in a certain mode, then listened to it and made selections or put something together". And he describes Maynard Solomon's latest writing about the Diabelli Variations as pretentious nonsense.
Although he has long made plain his special relationship with England - he has lived in London for three decades - he voices disappointment with the fighting of the war on Iraq. "There are quite a few things I like about this country \: the long parliamentary experience, the democratic tradition, the sense of fairness - at least in theory - also the fact that London is a big, cosmopolitan city, certainly more so than other European places.
"But the disappointment is there because like many people I welcomed \ Blair when he was elected and thought that the people had for once made a good decision. And I cannot pardon him for his decisions of the last year or two. For me he has lost credibility. I think it was obvious already from the start that this war is a phoney war.
"I was in New York when it started. The New York Times, which was very remarkable in speaking out, had a leader against the war. It seems quite clear that this war was based on false premises. Of course Saddam is a terrible man, and it's good to have him removed. But there are so many other consequences from this war, and there was no necessity to do it at that time, if at all."
He has a sharp sense of humour, and laughter freely punctures his conversation, sometimes with explosive force. When I ask about what in his musical career has given him the greatest pleasure he muses before laughing: "The fact that I did derive quite a lot of pleasure from it."
He's glad also that he was not "killed by anxieties or riddled by undue insecurity, at the same time not being overly secure", he says. "I'm very grateful for these things. I'm particularly happy about the fact that I had some luck. There are several ingredients that a talent needs to amount to something. But of course luck is one of them.
"My whole career is so atypical, and the fact that I have still developed in the last years and put something together that I didn't do before is again a kind of luck. There's a constitution there that has carried me so far. Now, of course, it's late days, and I have to watch it, see how I continue to function, what my memory and my ears and my spine and my arms are doing and then make plans for the day when I can't play any more.
"I always try to face facts. When I was sick and had to stop playing, 10 years or so ago, I told people that I have trouble with my arms. Other people go into hiding and do not show up and do not go out because they think the mystique will be lost. No. I talk about the day when I will have to stop or even the thought when I will have to die. I am in these matters very much a realist, and I use my poems for mockery, but not only.
"I was lucky, because I was not impatient. My career in my 30s did not seem to develop greatly in international matters, and it didn't make me really restless. I thought maybe something should happen, but I was not desperate. At the end of my 30s there was suddenly an opening of an international kind. I was also lucky that I was not spent too early. That I did not have to face pressures for which I was not prepared. That I could find out gradually what the world is like, and the people with whom I have to communicate, and what agents mean - yes! - and what it means to organise one or two years ahead. I have adjusted to this, and the greatest luck, good fortune, is that in my late years I had some wonderful surprises both on the personal side and on the literary side."
Alfred Brendel plays at the National Concert Hall, in Dublin, on Saturday