Mozart: Fantasia in C Minor, K.396; Piano Sonatas Alfred Brendel

• Piano Sonata No. 3 in B flat major, K. 281 (K.189f)
• 1 1. Allegro 04:55
• 2 2. Andante amoroso 04:57
• 3 3. Rondeau (Allegro) 05:05
• Piano Sonata No. 4 in E flat major, K. 282 (K. 189g)
• 4 1. Adagio - Molto allegro 05:35
• 5 2. Menuetto I-II 04:32
• 6 3. Allegro 03:12
• Piano Sonata No.18 in D, K.576
• 7 1. Allegro 05:15
• 8 2. Adagio 05:19
• 9 3. Allegretto 04:34
• 10 Fantasia In C Minor, K396 (Fragment) 11:44
• Total Runtime 55:08

Info zu Mozart: Fantasia in C Minor, K.396; Piano Sonatas

Mozart’s early piano sonatas, composed 1774-1775, are likely touring pieces the composer used for concerts he gave in Munich, Augsburg, and Paris. The writing is a combination of brilliant, virtuoso runs and ornaments–in which the trill is already an organic element in the melodic contour–and arioso, florid writing which balances operatic figures with dance forms. The G Minor episode in the finale of the B-flat Sonata hints at the kinds of deep pathos the later Mozart would communicate in symphony and religious works. The E-flat Sonata utilizes a curious format of Adagio-Menuetto-Allegro that Mozart would again employ in the A Major Sonata, K. 331 with its Turkish Rondo. This piece has more empfindsamkeit debts than does the B-flat, and the rolling arpeggios of the first movement may well have influenced Beethoven’s Op. 27, No. 2. The D Major Sonata (1789) is Mozart’s last in the form - a combination of direct, lyrical outpouring and learned two-part counterpoint.

The first movement bears the appellation “The Hunt” because of its horn-call effects. The second movement wanders into F# Minor/Major, the key of the second movement of the A Major Concerto, K. 488. The 1782 Fantasia is a piece whose genesis is a mystery, perhaps a truncated sketch for a passionate violin sonata. Maximilian Stadler claimed to have completed the piece from Mozart’s notes. Alfred Brendel has reinstated Mozart’s own text for the opening and the recapitulation, effectively adding symmetry and closure to this chromatic, deeply introspective piece.

Alfred Brendel renders these works with brittle, crystalline clarity, and the articulation of ornaments and grace notes is the soul of suave stateliness. The second subject in the E-flat Sonata Adagio elicits a musicbox sonority. Even given the relative brevity of the album, the intensity of the playing and the wide-ranging emotional canvas of the pieces dictate savoring this disc in selective parts rather than taken in one gulp. Brendel plays Mozart as Schnabel played Beethoven, with the ethos that only more of the same composer’s works make fitting encores. After the pearly play of the opening three sonatas, the C Minor Fantasia plunges us in to the wine-dark seas of epic tragedy, touched by the procedures of Bach and Handel, heady going. (Gary Lemco, www.audaud.com)

Alfred Brendel, piano

Alfred Brendel - Pianist
Alfred Brendel’s place among the greatest musicians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is assured. Renowned for his masterly interpretations of the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Schumann and Liszt, he is one of the indisputable authorities in musical life today.

During the 1960s, he became the first pianist ever to record the entire piano works of Beethoven (on the Vox label), a set which, in the opinion of one critic, still contains “some of the finest Beethoven ever recorded”. In the 1970s, Brendel returned to Beethoven with a complete cycle of the piano sonatas on the Philips label for which he has recorded exclusively since 1969. Brendel’s discography is now among the most extensive of any pianist, reflecting a repertoire of solo, chamber and orchestral works by the major composers from the central European tradition from Bach through to Schoenberg.

Among the countless prizes he has won (sometimes on more than one occasion) are the Grand Prix of the Liszt Society, the Gramophone Award, Grand Prix du Disque, the Japan Record Academy Award, the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis, the Grand Prix de l’Academie du Disque Français, the Edison Prize and the British Music Trades Association Prize to name but a few. Important musical awards include the Léonie Sonning Prize, the Siemens Prize, the Prix Venezia, and in 2009 the Praemium Imperiale.

He was made an Honorary KBE in 1989 for his “outstanding services to music in Britain”, awarded the Légion d’Honneur in 2004, received the highest rank in the Order of Merit of the German Federal Republic in 2007, and holds honorary degrees from the universities of Oxford, Yale, Exeter and Dublin.

He is a recipient of the Hans von Bülow medal of the Berlin Philharmonic and was made an Honorary Member of the Wiener Philharmoniker in 1998, an honour conferred on only two other pianists, Emil von Sauer and Wilhelm Backhaus, since this orchestra’s foundation in 1842. Alfred Brendel has begun giving illustrated lectures at musical institutions and universities around the world on musical subjects and issues that have always been central to his own insatiable interpretative quest.

His farewell concert took place with the Vienna Philharmonic on December 18, 2008, which was recently voted one of the 100 greatest cultural moments of the last ten years by The Daily Telegraph.

Dieses Album enthält kein Booklet