In the latest episode of Music for a While, I pay tribute to some people recently departed—including Alfred Brendel, the pianist. “He played just about everything,” I say, “but he was especially prized, I think, in Mozart, Schubert, and Liszt.” I proceed to play recordings by him of music by all three composers.
I could have said Beethoven too—probably should have. Brendel recorded the complete Beethoven sonatas three times, for heaven’s sake. (There are thirty-two of them.) His first set was for the Vox label.
Allow me to walk down memory lane, a long way.
When I was quite young, my sister, a little older, took ballet lessons. Across the street from the ballet studio was a public library, which had a record section. I would hang out there, listening with big, oversize headphones, while she took her lessons.
I got a hold of those Vox recordings. Was that my introduction to Beethoven piano sonatas? I can’t quite remember, but possibly it was.
Alfred Brendel has been with me all of my life, pretty much (as has the other fellow, Beethoven).
In my podcast, I quote the tribute paid to Brendel by Sir Simon Rattle, the conductor. Here is part of that tribute:
I visited him often in his Hampstead home. I met his friend Isaiah Berlin there, terrifying enough on its own, and Berlin said to me, “You know, I don’t think Alfred has ever had an unoriginal thought,” an astonishing but probably accurate observation from an intelligence that could recognize its equal.
Was Brendel as bright as Berlin? There is no need to weigh the question. Whatever the answer, I would love to have eavesdropped on their conversations.
I end my podcast with a song by Wilson & Love—Brian Wilson and Mike Love. Wilson died a couple of weeks ago; Love is still with us. Let me quote a piece I wrote in 2020, titled “Waxing Lyrical.” It begins,
I was sitting around, listening to the Beach Boys, as one does. Specifically, I was listening to the King’s Singers in an arrangement of one Beach Boys song: “Good Vibrations.” We have all heard this song all of our lives, but I had never quite focused on one lyric: “I don’t know where, but she sends me there.”
I tweeted, as one does. I said that this lyric was possibly my favorite, in any pop song. “It is borderline nonsensical,” I said, “but so wonderful.”
Responding was my friend Roger Kimball, the editor of The New Criterion. “Borderline, maybe,” he said, “but the right side of the border! Wasn’t it Wallace Stevens who said that poetry resists the intelligence almost successfully?”
It was indeed. The Stevens poem “Man Carrying Thing” begins like this: “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.”
A splendid, shrewd line. Again, to listen to this new Music for a While, go here.
