This time last year pianist Alfred Brendel was performing in a concert series celebrating his 70th birthday, and informing us that he had no intention of "going into hiding". Twelve months on, his resolve shows no sign of diminishing.
This recital repeated a programme he had given at Aldeburgh festival a few days earlier. Then, some found his playing sounded tired, as though he was on autopilot. But there was no sign of that here - unless you count an aspect of his artistry that can make music sound as though it is driven by something far more intrinsic and less accommodating than pure sentiment.
In the best of Brendel's playing one is always aware of the music's line - its direction, contour, logic. Occasionally this can mean that the quality of the odd decorative note is smudged, sacrificed for the sake of sustaining this stream of musical thought. Showy flourishes and elaborate decoration aren't really his thing, and this can make his playing seem, in the more Romantic repertoire at least, a little dry.
Yet the compensations are glorious. Nobody, surely, can have been untouched by the opening of the Adagio of Schubert's Sonata in C minor (D958), lovingly shaped into the longest phrase imaginable. Brendel has described this sonata as being perhaps the most "neurotic" in Schubert's output, and here it emerged as one of extraordinary power. The first movement was full of impatient drive; passages of the finale really danced, Brendel's hands skipping over each other so that the bass could mimic the treble. But the Adagio, with its juxtaposition of serenity with thinly veiled turbulence, remained the core of the work.
Brahms's Four Ballades followed, taking Brendel's hands to both extremes of the keyboard. The fourth seemed initially emollient next to the others, its second theme emerging smoothly and clearly from between the outer lines. But Brahms could conceal music of remarkable weight and intensity behind the facade of something pleasantly soothing, and the sense of culmination Brendel saved for the final bars left no doubt as to the piece's seriousness.
These works were framed by two Mozart sonatas. The unfussy delicacy of the K311 had a music-box quality to it that wasn't quite as innocent as it seemed; the K533 Sonata in F had a bubbling clarity, and seemed to end naturally when it had exhausted itself. Brendel may have made it sound easy; but this time he certainly wasn't on autopilot.
