Brendel Shows Mastery of Piano Sonatas

Alfred Brendel has devoted the last four seasons to a probing survey of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. In his recital Tuesday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the renowned Austrian pianist embraced the masters on either side of that Viennese titan--Haydn, Mozart and Schubert.

This is also familiar territory for Brendel, and the results were equally thoughtful and engaging.

Brendel does not exploit extreme contrasts but finds within distinct, tasteful limits a multitude of colors, shadings, dynamics and meanings. His lyricism is understated, lean--some consider it a bit dry--but it does not preclude a sense of the living heart of the music.

A sense of freshness and constant discovery emerged in his traversal of Haydn’s sonatas in B minor and D, Hob. XVI: 32 and 42, respectively. The set of variations on an elfin theme, which begins the Sonata in D, in fact, sounded as if it were being created immediately, spontaneously.

He grounded the whole concept of the form in what must have been its original purpose--to show genius at play. It was as if we were eavesdropping on the composer’s thinking, “Here’s an idea, what can I do with it?”

If Haydn’s music opened up in these exploratory ways, Mozart’s Sonata in C, K. 330, emerged as a magical jewel box, almost as one of those puzzles in which one item or idea contains another. At some point, walls became mirrors or even windows, which was beguiling. Yet when Mozart bares his heart in the breathless moments of the slow movement, Brendel brought us to the experience directly, without fuss, commentary or distortion.

With Schubert’s final solo piano work, the complex Sonata in B flat, D. 960, Brendel moved into an entirely different spiritual dimension. A pianist must grasp the inner line of this work because its many changes mean that it doesn’t cohere easily on its own.

Here is where Brendel revealed years of living with the music of this composer. He unfolded the opening as a long-breathed arc, suspended the slow movement in a rapt meditation, effortlessly shifted between crystalline and gossamer textures in the third movement and exploited the drama and its resolution in the last. But these are details that can only suggest the impact of the whole.

Brendel’s single encore was Schubert’s Impromptu in G flat, Opus 90, No. 3.