Classical Alfred Brendel, Royal Festival Hall ****
Alfred Brendel's Festival Hall recital on Thursday offered a potted history of the Viennese classical legacy, though one that purposely bypassed the most overpowering presence in that lineage; having devoted himself for so long so recently to a worldwide cycle of the Beethoven sonatas, he is now building his solo appearances around the other great composers of the tradition to which he has dedicated his career.
So Haydn, Schubert and Mozart it was, and in that order, for he chose to end his programme not with Schubert's towering A major D959 (that came before the interval), but with Mozart's much slighter Sonata in the same key, prefaced by the C minor Fantasy and the A minor Rondo. A possible rationale emerged in the performance of the Schubert, for Brendel seems to invest the work now with less theatrical grandeur than once he did; the dramatics of the opening were played down and the second subject of the first movement took on greater expressive weight; the slow movement too was more limpid, less anguished than before.
As his lucid account of Haydn's E minor Sonata had already revealed, the pianist was in relaxed mood; even his tone, more singing, more rounded than it sometimes can be, signalled that. His acute observation, reprinted in the programme, that "Haydn springs surprises while Schubert allows himself to be surprised", was beautifully illustrated by this pair of performances: the Haydn was alert, diverting, playful, the Schubert dreamy, magically coloured by harmonic shifts and chromatic inflections.
An announcement at the beginning of the second half asked that there be no applause between the three Mozart works; they were clearly intended as a meaningful sequence. The C minor Fantasy in fact is often played as a preface to the sonata in the same key, an approach that Brendel rejects. His reading, elusive and slightly brittle as if mistrusting the work's lyricism, encompassed a self-contained emotional world, to which the A minor Rondo added a lingering postscript. Yet coming after those pieces, the A major sonata seemed almost superfluous; its rather static harmony rarely straying out of the home key seemed tame by comparison, even though it pacing could not be faulted.
