Absurdities of the keyboard

AS someone who appreciates the world’s absurdities, Alfred Brendel has naturally been following the current scandal in his own field: how the widower of a long-ailing British pianist has confessed to stealing other musicians’ recordings and passing them off as his wife’s, thus winning raves from critics in the woman’s last years.

“The whole thing is so ridiculous,” Brendel said the other day, shaking his head at the naivete of the supposed experts who so wanted to believe they had stumbled on an undiscovered genius that they bought the notion that Joyce Hatto, though unable to perform in public for three decades, had somehow made “a hundred records of the most demanding pieces.” And where had this woman, who couldn’t play for live audiences, found the “obscure orchestra” her sound engineer husband listed on the CDs he sold under his own label? “Who was the conductor who does not exist, who was an invented thing? And how is it possible that such different playing comes from one person?”

As Brendel spoke, musical sleuths had only begun unraveling the extent of the fraud, but they had found that a recording of Liszt’s “Transcendental Etudes” that the husband marketed as his cancer-stricken wife’s was the work of Laszlo Simon, while her supposed Rachmaninoff concertos were Yefim Bronfman playing. Still, Brendel said he would be “amused” if any of his own recordings -- and there are a lot, five decades’ worth -- were found to have been pirated. He just doubted the husband would have been that foolish.

“It is rather unlikely,” said the 76-year-old pianist. “Because I think they concentrated on people who are not well known ... these lesser-known people.”

Brendel, who stopped in Manhattan shortly before launching his annual North American tour -- including a recital Tuesday in Los Angeles -- has long embraced the interplay of supposed opposites. Between chaos and order in music, for instance. Or between sense and nonsense in his poetry, like some verses imagining a pianist growing a third index finger that he could use “to expose an obstinate cougher in the hall.”

There’s also the interplay of ego and humility in the life of a musician, and that’s an issue sometimes brought up by others, for few performers so accomplished have so emphasized the limits of their own role. “Without the composer, the performer would not exist,” he noted, and no performer should be called a genius -- certainly not that faker Hatto, but not him either, or even Horowitz. Indeed, Brendel has dared to express his own less-than-total enthusiasm for that most legendary of pianists, whose “kind of virtuosity” may have pleased the crowds but “rarely served the music as I understood it.”

Brendel knows he can get in trouble talking that way -- you can’t be caught saying you’re better than Horowitz -- but he’ll point to the man’s recording of Liszt’s B-minor sonata as “too rhapsodic over long stretches” and thus contrary to “what Liszt intended.”

That’s not to diminish the role of the player. As he sees it, it’s the performer’s highest calling to “do justice to the piece ... to understand it on its own terms ... and not tell the pieces what they should be like and tell the composers what they should have composed.”

True, he’s observed that some composers take liberties with their works -- Rachmaninoff when he recorded his second piano concerto, or Bartok when he played his Suite, Opus 14, much faster than the metronome markings. “He was the composer,” Brendel reasoned. “He had the better right to do so than a performer would.” Then again, “Maybe he didn’t even notice.... Who knows?”

An “Austrian mix” who was born in Moravia -- currently part of the Czech Republic -- Brendel published an interview-style autobiography a few years ago called “Me of All People.” Prompted by questions from a Swiss writer, he says he knew that he was talented but was “not impatient” early in his career when he did not get the same attention as some other pianists, nor did he aspire to “hero worship.”

A New York Review of Books piece subsequently expressed skepticism that he was “content for his career to evolve slowly.” More likely, the article speculated, the situation “seemed to him absurd and perhaps depressing.” But Brendel wrote back that they should “take me at my word when I say that I am still puzzled by success, and that the relatively slow pace of my career ... left me largely unruffled.”

“I am not,” he concluded, “a poseur.”

He’s also the pianist who, when he first saw himself on TV, noticed wild arm movements that might distract audiences from the music, so he began practicing surrounded by mirrors to force himself to eliminate those gestures. The critics could theorize that a performer is by definition a showman, but “I do not understand this,” he insisted. “I want to not be the focus.”

Brendel certainly is a musical scholar, however, so he knows how the arc of a pianist’s career is often different from that of other musicians. Violinists tend to be child prodigies, like 10-year-old Yehudi Menuhin, “who played the Beethoven concerto in Germany, and Fritz Busch, who was his conductor and a very critical musician, ... said in his memoir that he played to perfection, and that means not just as a violinist but also in the understanding of the work. Sort of mysterious, but this happens.” The catch is how that may create an intense pressure on the prodigy -- “they have to keep it up.” And “sometimes there is not much development after this.”

Conductors, on the other hand, can go on forever, “or even longer,” he noted with a laugh, recalling the Vienna Philharmonic’s Karl Bohm, who kept at it until he died during a rehearsal, at nearly 87, “and there was a joke that in Rotterdam, before the beginning of the performance, the manager would come out in front of the curtain and say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am very sorry to tell you that Dr. Bohm has died. But in order to save the performance he is willing to conduct dead.’ ”

Pianists, he said, fall in between. Rarely are they quite such prodigies as Menuhin, but they can be long-lasting if they are lucky, even if the physical demands of the instrument mean they can’t hang on quite like Bohm, or at least perform certain “athletic” pieces forever -- persistent arm pain forced Brendel to give up the likes of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata a few years back. “But there’s a lot of pieces left,” he said.

In his own mind, the pace of his career stems from his being from a family “not particularly interested in aesthetic matters,” then going through critical years, 14 and 15, when wartime did not provide him much time to play. He can recall the disturbing mass hysteria when Hitler drove through his hometown, Graz, and when he was put to work digging trenches in conditions that brought on frostbite -- perhaps one reason he is so protective of his fingers, wearing bandages at all times.

Longevity, or still ‘a musical reality’

AS late as 1962, when he was recording all of Beethoven’s piano music for the second-rung Vox label, a Times critic made note of this “major project” by a then-31-year-old Brendel, “of whom nothing is known to this department.” The next year, when he soloed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic thanks to Zubin Mehta, an early booster, the critic still wasn’t sure -- the bespectacled Viennese seemed “pleasant enough, but a little more heart and imagination would have been appropriate.”

A decade later, though, The Times’ new critic, Martin Bernheimer, was hailing the sold-out appearances by this “inspired master” who strode to the piano with “old-world solemnity” and made the audience experience the music first, eschewing “wild impetuosity ... for its own sake.” Now the only debate was whether he’d brought the formal concert “brilliantly to a gentle conclusion” or “gently to a brilliant conclusion,” with Beethoven’s Opus 110, a piece he will be performing again, 34 years on, at Disney Hall this week.

In between, there were contemporaries such as Van Cliburn and Byron Janis who had won competitions and headlines only to be sidelined by ailments (arthritis in Janis’ case) or other pressures. Brendel does not name names, but he recalls a little antique shop that used to be in Paris’ Place des Vosges. “It was called Myth and Legends,” he said. “I passed by, and I imagined that every other month, another pianist was sitting in the window.”

He was never up there, of course. “I have tried to remain,” he explained, “a musical reality.”

Brendel, whose home base is now London, allows himself only one real holiday a year, a week to 10 days in September when he’ll go to France or Italy to “look around” at the art and architecture. Then he takes a “winter break” in December and January, but that’s hardly time away from the piano. Indeed, that’s his time to get ready for the year’s touring, meaning he’s “in training as much as I can be at my age.”

“There are some people who for decades don’t do any holidays ... musicians who are really afraid of stopping and starting,” he said, pointing not only to the physical challenges but to the apprehension that comes with going from “no adrenaline to yes adrenaline.”

He decides on his recital programs at least a year ahead, weighing both artistic and practical considerations, such as how to create two 40-minute halves. For 2007, he settled on two C-minor sonatas, by Haydn and Mozart, as the pillars. He figures audiences may not be aware that Haydn composed “the first great classical sonata” and that those of Mozart can’t all be characterized as “sort of nice pieces but of minor importance.”

The search for ‘a fresh impression’

IN between, he scheduled Schubert’s “Impromptus” and that Beethoven sonata, Opus 110, which is an exception to his general principle that an artist’s life should have no bearing on how we listen to his or her work, that there’s no need to know “what a certain composer has eaten for breakfast on a certain day.” In this case, Beethoven had just come back from devastating jaundice, “and he has even written it there on the last fugue, ‘Gradually coming back to life.’ And before that there are the ariosos -- the first one is ‘song of lament,’ the second one is ‘song of exhausted lament.’ ”

Brendel has recorded all the Beethoven sonatas three times, but he said he first played this one anew during his break -- “to have a fresh impression” -- and only then listened to his earlier efforts to decide “what should be improved and what should be rectified [and] what should be kept.” In this instance, he was surprised that he most liked the “overview” of his first recording, for Vox. He also drew ideas from a 1930s recording by Edwin Fischer, the great exponent of simplicity whose master classes he attended in the ‘50s.

While in New York, Brendel practiced in the apartment of someone he met in those classes, Katja Andy, who had studied with Fischer as a girl in Germany but had to flee, as a Jew, in 1933. Now 99 and nearly blind, she jokes that she’s so old she “almost heard Brahms.” She also recalls when, half a century ago, “I had the audacity to criticize Albert,” but insists there was none of that this time, when for two straight days he played his entire program for her. “Not anymore,” she said of the nitpicking. “I just enjoy him.”

Except there was one movement, Brendel said, that she did find ... slightly precipitated.

“So I played it a little less precipitated. And then she was happy.”

His father lived a long time too, to 90, so “in my own perception, I’m not very old,” Brendel said. “I can still improve things. I’m still developing.”

But there does come a time ...

His schedule is set through next year, when the itinerary does not include a Los Angeles stop. And after that? “I have to see how I feel

In other words, this week could mark his final appearance in a city that early on, by American standards, put out the welcome mat for him, even if he had to put up with certain annoyances. Another of those dialectics he favors is between sound and silence, and it’s sometimes hard to get the latter in a California concert hall. “There’s more coughing than anywhere else in the world,” he once observed, wondering if air conditioning was the reason. And let’s not bring up those noisy planes over the Hollywood Bowl, where he’s also performed over the decades.

Yet we have to ask directly if this visit could be his last, which gets him agitated, really agitated.

“Yes,” he said. “But I don’t want to talk about it. Please!

“Don’t you understand?” said this musician who insists that in the end, it shouldn’t be about him. “I don’t want to do ‘farewell concerts’ or anything of that sort. If I stop, I shall stop. But unannounced.”

paul.lieberman@latimes.com

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Alfred Brendel

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall,

111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday

Price: $33 to $86

Contact: (323) 850-2000 or www.laphil.com