Brendel’s US farewell tour reaches finale

Has the great classical pianist Alfred Brendel bitten off more than he can chew with his year-long farewell tour before he retires at Christmas? Last night, the 77-year-old concluded the American leg of the tour with a sellout recital at the Strathmore arts centre outside Washington DC. But while the Washington Post's critic was generally enthusiastic, she picked up on the imperfections. Writing of his interpretation of Schubert's Sonata in B flat major - "a kind of valedictory" which took up the entire second half of the concert - Anne Midgette wrote: "Brendel's opening was ruminative, and pregnant with reined-in power; but technical slips began to mark the piece's flow. Still, no one seemed to want to concede that it was the end when the piece was over."

Brendel's American tour has taken in New York, Minneapolis, Chicago and Boston - Pittsburgh missed out when he had to withdraw with a cold. After his Carnegie Hall recital in New York last month, Fred Kirshnit of the New York Sun wrote of Brendel's playing of the same Schubert sonata that it was "for better or worse, vintage Alfred Brendel". He went on: "The occasional wrong chord or finger slip notwithstanding, this was a relatively clean reading, but what was missing was that sense of wonder, that uniquely Schubertian feeling of being lost in time and space. For a man who writes poetry, Mr Brendel is a rather prosaic interpreter of the classics".

Of the Mozart Sonata in F Major, Kirshnit wrote: "Mr Brendel was in a no nonsense mood, not pausing more than a beat between movements. He must be anxious to get home to London to enjoy his retirement."

To be fair, others have gushed their enthusiasm for the Austrian who has made London his home for the past 30 years. The Chicago Tribune critic John von Rhein wrote: "What a concert it was... I've never heard him play better... You had less the sense of an old pro revisiting old haunts than a questing intelligence letting the composers tell him in which directions to take their music."

In the New Yorker, Alex Ross wrote of the Carnegie Hall recital: "What concert-goers may remember most was the silences... For his last encore, Brendel played Schubert's Impromptu in F flat... The little pause before the ovation began was the deepest silence of all."

Brendel will spend the remainder of the year touring Britain and Europe, beginning with a concert in Gateshead on April 20 and finishing up in Vienna for his swansong on December 18. Then he'll be free to devote time to his second love, poetry. As Kirshnit of the New York Sun put is: "All of us will miss him, but especially his critics. After all, we won't have Alfred Brendel to kick around anymore."