Alfred Brendel, pianist

               


Photo credit: Benjamin Ealovega
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"Brendel's playing is distinguished by its heightened intellectual and emotional intensity, by his ability to energize details while sustaining taut lines, by his infallible grasp of musical architecture and by his extraordinary empathy with composers. His performances often achieve a sense of inevitability. Surely, a listener feels, this is what the composer intended."
~ Time

"One of the defining performers of our age"
~ Boston Globe

"The audience felt as if he had taken them on a miraculous adventure of mind and music"
~ Chicago Tribune

“If there were any musician whose intuition about Beethoven I would probably trust, it would be Alfred Brendel.“   - Lecture "On Character in Music", Washington Performing Arts Society, Ionarts, November 18, 2009

“By assigning Beethoven‘s sonatas characters, descriptive phrases, moods and other labels, he turns analysis, often so mathematical and structural, into a kind of poetry, available to the everyman. And though based on solid scholarship, he has fun with it, uses his imagination.“   - Lecture "On Character in Music", Orange County for the Performing Arts, OC Register, October 27, 2009

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  Lecture "On Character in Music", Washington Performing Arts Society, Ionarts  (November 18, 2009)

  Lecture "On Character in Music", Orange County for the Performing Arts, OC Register  (October 27, 2009)

  Orchestra Hall Recital, The Chicago Tribune  (March 11, 2008)

  Carnegie Hall Recital, The New Yorker  (March 10, 2008)

  Beethoven 3 w/Minnesota Orchestra, The Pioneer Press  (March 6, 2008)

  Beethoven 3 w/Cleveland Orchestra, The Cleveland Plain Dealer  (March 1, 2008)

  Symphony Hall Recital, The Boston Globe  (February 25, 2008)

  Carnegie Hall Recital, The New York Times  (February 22, 2008)

  Contra Costa Times  (March 19, 2007)

  The Los Angeles Times  (March 15, 2007)

  The Chicago Tribune, K453 w/CSO  (March 10, 2007)

  The Chicago Tribune, Recital Review  (March 6, 2007)

  Unlimited/The Observer  (June 25, 2006)

  The New York Times  (March 1, 2006)

  Washington Post  (February 9, 2006)

  New York Times  (March 26, 2005)

  Seattle Post Intelligencer  (March 15, 2005)

  Denver Post  (March 10, 2005)

  Boston Globe  (March 4, 2005)

  Twin Cities Pioneer Press  (March 3, 2005)

  New York Times  (August 20, 2004)

  London Telegraph  (August 19, 2004)

  Boston Globe  (April 27, 2004)

  Boston Herald  (April 26, 2004)

  New York Times  (April 22, 2004)

  Chicago Tribune  (April 20, 2004)

  The Philadelphia Inquirer  (March 29, 2004)

  New York Times  (March 2, 2003)