Alfred Brendel has been making records since the early 1950s, when as a twenty-something he recorded the Prokofiev Fifth Piano Concerto for Vox, then moving on to major chunks of the standard Viennese repertoire before joining Philips Records in the early 1970s, where he became one of that label’s most-recorded artists. Between Vox and Philips, however, Brendel stopped off to make a series of records in Vienna for the Solomon brothers’ mid-price Cardinal label that Seymour Solomon has now issued, again at mid-price, on Vanguard Classics.
Brendel, like Charles Rosen, is an “intellectual” pianist, meaning, I suppose, that he writes words as well as plays notes, though the music he addresses here lies smack in the middle of even a dim virtuoso’s core repertoire. It’s in Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies that Brendel makes best use of his imagination and fingers; rarely have I heard even the hackneyed Rhapsody No.2 sound as fresh or as fun as it does in Brendel’s “cerebral” presentation. This recording was engineered by Karl Wolleitner, Vienna’s unsung recording hero, whose sound perfectly captures Brendel’s pearly piano tone.
