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The Guardian
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Majestic, rigorous and sheer fun: the best of Alfred Brendel's recordings
In the two decades before he retired from concert-performances in 2008 at the age of 77, Alfred Brendel was arguably the best known classical pianist in the world. Yet regard for his playing was never by any means universal; what his many admirers found as searching, considered and profound in his interpretations, others heard as colourless and lacking in spontaneity. But Brendel's lasting popularity is evidenced by his recorded legacy, which is certainly extensive enough for generations to come to make their own assessment of his stature. In a recording career that stretched well over half a century, he made more than 100 albums, which included three complete cycles of the Beethoven sonatas. As his career burgeoned, Beethoven, and the other great composers of the Austro-German tradition - Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms - were increasingly the focus of Brendel's recital repertory, but a glance at a chronology of his recordings reveals how wide his musical interests really were. If it is Brendel's discs of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert that will be treasured above all, there is much else to be discovered among the myriad recordings he left us. The recordings that follow, therefore, are very much a personal choice; another day, it might be entirely different. Busoni: Fantasia Contrappuntistica (1953) Busoni was a composer who fascinated Brendel, but he recorded very little of the piano music, with the exception of this early performance of the Italian musician's most challenging solo work. Mussorgsky, Balakirev and Stravinsky (1955) A sampler from early in his career of some of the Russian repertoire with which Brendel was never associated later in his life. Liszt: Opera Transcriptions (1958) Liszt, especially the great B minor Sonata, remained part of Brendel's repertory for much of his career, but early on he spread his net much wider, as this collection shows. Schumann: Works for oboe (1980) Brendel recorded relatively little chamber music, but he did make some discs as an accompanist, including a Winterreise with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and this jewel-like collection in which he partnered the greatest oboist of the age, Heinz Holliger. Mozart: The Piano Concertos (1980s) The cycle of the Mozart piano concertos that Brendel recorded with Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields was one of landmark discs of the 1980s. Haydn: 11 Sonatas (1986) The essence of Brendel's Viennese style, utterly lacking in affectation and mannerisms. Schubert: Piano Sonatas D958, 959 & 960 (1988) Schubert's late sonatas always seem to bring the best out of Brendel, his intellectual rigour, his sense of lyricism and sometimes sheer fun. Brahms: Piano Concerto No 1 (1987) In later years especially, Brendel did not play much of Brahms's solo piano music, but he performed the concertos, as this magnificent account of the First, with Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic shows. Beethoven Piano Concerto No 5 (1988) A majestic, live performance of the Emperor Concerto, with Kurt Masur conducting. Beethoven: Diabelli Variations (1990) As masterly as all his Beethoven performances were, it often seemed as if the Diabelli Variations brought the very best out of Brendel, with their quickfire changes of mood, moments of introspection and wicked humour. Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Opp 90, 101, 106,109, 110, 111 (1993) A compilation from the second of Brendel's three Beethoven sonata cycles, released just as he was about to begin a third, digital cycle for Philips. Schoenberg: Piano Concerto (1996) After the early years Brendel played very little 20th-century music, but Schoenberg's concerto did remain part of his repertory; this recording, with Michael Gielen conducting, is one of at least two that he made.
New York Times
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Maria Tipo, Italian Pianist Who Beguiled Critics, Dies at 93
Maria Tipo, a connoisseur's pianist whose flawless technique and songlike sonorities earned her the admiration of fellow musicians and critics, though she was less well known to the public, died on Feb. 10 at her home in Florence, Italy. She was 93. Her death was announced by the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole, where she taught for more than 20 years before her retirement in 2009. Ms. Tipo's career began in spectacular fashion, with triumphs in several major European competitions, a strong endorsement from the piano titan Arthur Rubinstein, and exhausting tours of the United States throughout the 1950s. But then she largely faded from public view, apart from occasionally releasing recordings, which usually drew high praise from music critics and a brief return to touring in the 1990s. From the 1960s on, she devoted herself mostly to teaching. She once explained to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that the loneliness of concert life had worn her down: 'There is the concert, yes, but it only lasts a couple of hours, and then you are alone with yourself again.' Her fellow star pianists cherished her. Martha Argerich considered Ms. Tipo one of the greats and sent her Argentine compatriot Nelson Goerner for lessons. Hundreds of students passed through Ms. Tipo's courses at conservatories in Bolzano, Florence, Geneva and Fiesole, and she created what critics described as an Italian school of piano playing. Teaching, she told the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera in 2016, was 'like a duty, to stay close to the young as they develop.' Ms. Tipo inherited her style from one of Italy's greatest 19th- and early-20th-century masters, Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924); her mother had been Busoni's student, and when Ms. Tipo was a child growing up in Naples, her mother was her first teacher. From Busoni's influence on her mother, Ms. Tipo developed an emphatic, highly characterized manner, with strong contrasts of light and shadow. 'For him there was no limit to the piano, no limit to the possibilities of sonority,' she said of Busoni in an interview with the critic Richard Dyer of The Boston Globe in 1991. 'This was his greatness.' It was her greatness too, in the eyes of critics like Mr. Dyer, who wrote in 1988 that 'Tipo's particular glory is the beauty of her tone.' An early recording of 12 Scarlatti sonatas, made when she was 25, became an object of devotion among aficionados; in 1956 Newsweek called it 'the most spectacular record of the year.' The New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg wrote in 1991 that 'American record collectors went wild' over the recording. Her bright, sharply articulated Scarlatti playing — on the piano, and not on the harpsichord or fortepiano, for which the sonatas were written — became a trademark. 'It is legitimate to play Scarlatti on the piano,' she insisted to the Italian state broadcaster RAI in 1977, before launching into a performance of total control and precision. Mr. Schonberg praised the 'bracing rhythmic vitality' of her Scarlatti, 'clear, with détaché fingering and yet a mellow legato when a long line was needed.' She created a renaissance for the neglected piano sonatas of the early-19th-century Anglo-Italian virtuoso Muzio Clementi, recording a complete cycle for the first time to critical acclaim. 'I found a sort of Italianness in the music of Clementi,' she told Oreste Bossini of RAI in a 2015 broadcast. 'It is close to my nature. I'm a Neapolitan, full of high spirits, willful.' She was also known for her recording of Busoni's piano transcriptions of Bach organ works, as well as for her interpretations of Schumann and Chopin. 'One forgot she was playing a piece one knows, that one has heard other people play; one forgot, even, that she was playing the piano,' Mr. Dyer wrote about a 1993 performance of Schumann's 'Davidsbündlertänze.' 'She didn't 'evoke' different states of emotion; she realized them completely.' A 2004 review of her recording of Chopin's nocturnes in the British magazine Gramophone praised her 'consuming sensitivity to the precise weight and color of each note.' Maria Luisa Tipo was born in Naples on Dec. 23, 1931. Her mother, Ersilia Cavallo, was a concert pianist; her father, she told The Baltimore Sun in 1993, was a mathematics professor who loved music. When she was a teenager, at the end of World War II, her mother brought her to Rome to study with the great Italian modernist composer Alfredo Casella (1883-1947), who was already ailing. 'I saw him between operations,' she told La Repubblica. 'He was very sweet. And he praised my legato so much.' Her big break came in 1949, when, at age 17, she won first prize at the Geneva International Music Competition. Three years later, she placed third at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, attracting the attention of Rubinstein, who was a juror. She made her New York debut in 1955 at Town Hall, drawing praise from Mr. Schonberg, who wrote that she 'carried the audience with the verve of her playing and her natural affinity to the keyboard.' She would go on to play with the world's leading orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony. She retired from the concert stage in 1995, explaining to Il Corriere: 'I've never liked playing for myself. I've always done it only for the listeners.' Ms. Tipo is survived by her daughter, the violinist Alina Company. Ms. Tipo's marriages to the guitarist and composer Alvaro Company and the pianist Alessandro Specchi ended in divorce. Mr. Schonberg, writing in 1991, drew a picture of Ms. Tipo that is amply projected in her extensive legacy of recordings: 'Those who have had anything to do with Miss Tipo know how decisive she is. She is tall, imposing, genial, prone to laughter, but she can also be stubborn. When she makes up her mind, her chin juts forward, steel comes into her eyes, and she is immovable.'
The Guardian
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Klangforum Wien review – Vienna focus brings lucid and colour-filled Pierrot Lunaire
Founded by the composer and conductor Beat Furrer in 1985, Klangforum Wien is now regarded as one of Europe's finest new-music ensembles. But, for its first visit to the Wigmore Hall in London, the Vienna-based chamber orchestra brought two programmes that focused on what was new a century ago, when, on either side of the first world war, the Austrian capital was the epicentre of modernism in music. In the second of Klangforum's concerts, though, only the work that ended the concert, Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire truly belonged to that revolutionary movement. The first half had been made up of pieces by composers who were very much watchers from the sidelines of modernism, who borrowed some of its tendencies without fully embracing them. Franz Schreker's strange little 'dance allegory' Der Wind, for a quintet of clarinet, horn, piano and strings, from 1909, parades some strikingly original colours alongside moments of pure romantic kitsch, while Hanns Eisler's Divertimento for wind quintet, composed in 1923 while he was still studying with Schoenberg, was one of the first works to adopt his teacher's newly formulated 12-note technique, yet could almost be a lighter-weight, wittier version of Schoenberg's own wind quintet. There was also Busoni's Berceuse Elégiaque, in an arrangement for chamber orchestra that Erwin Stein made for Schoenberg's Society for Private Music Performances, and which involved all 12 Klangforum players in reproducing the lusciously honeyed textures. Vimbayi Kaziboni conducted the Busoni, and also took charge of Pierrot Lunaire, in which the soloist was the mezzo-soprano Barbara Kozelj, whose wonderfully lucid delivery of the text favoured the gesang end of the Sprechgesang spectrum. The odd touch of winsomeness aside, her performance was wonderfully assured but not at all theatrical. The most vivid imagery came from the ensemble, especially the cellist Andreas Lindenbaum, who added real sepulchral gloom to the eighth movement, Nacht, and led off the grotesquerie in the 16th, Gemeinheit! (Atrocity). But all five instrumentalists ensured that every fleck of colour in Schoenberg's feverish score registered, so that for once music and words seemed perfectly fused, just as they should be in what is one of the great precursors of late 20th-century music theatre.
