Audience fails to recognise remarkable start to season

Alfred Brendel is rightly acknowledged as one of the world's truly great pianists and it was an honour for the Ilkley Concert Club that he agreed to provide the first recital of its 60th anniversary year.

He is touring this programme around the world's major concert halls including New York's Carnegie Hall and Symphony Hall, Chicago.

Reviewing the concert at London's Royal Festival Hall, where it was chosen as the last event before its two-year closure for refurbishment, the enthusiastic Guardian critic wrote: "for this final recital it became clear that Brendel was the right man for the job".

Yet the audience's reaction to his concert in Ilkley was curiously tepid, disconcertingly so to the artist I was told, who had prepared two encores but chose, quite rightly to give only the Haydn.

A past year's piano recital, which I described as submitting the instrument to GBH had received rapturous applause. There's a clue there maybe.

To prepare for this review I looked up his website, www.alfredbrendel.com where the first thing you find is this quotation 'If I belong to a tradition, it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what he should do and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like or the composer what he ought to have composed'.

This, as he demonstrated throughout his wonderful recital, does not imply a faceless approach to the music, not at all, but one that seeks out unerringly the composer's intentions. Nor does it mean an over-intellectualised lofty and humourless approach. Here is a man who says his favourite occupation is laughing and his two books of poetry, 'One Finger Too Many' and 'Cursing Bagels' (Faber) attest to this.

Nor does it mean that the playing is so infinitely subtle in its approach that only the true cognoscenti can appreciate its wonders. His is playing of the highest order for anyone with musical ears to hear. Here's what my not-at-all extraordinary ears heard.

He began with Mozart's Variations on a minuet by Duport. The theme was played very straight but then it was as if we were following Mozart's increasing engagement with Duport's little tune as each ensuing variation took us ever more deeply into Mozart's rich imagination. The control of dynamics and phrasing was remarkable. The return of the theme, albeit richly decorated, had almost the kind of wonder that Bach achieves at the end of his Goldberg Variations.

Mozart provided the notes but it needs a pianist with a powerful grasp of their structural significance to bring this out in performance.

Schumann's Kreisleriana inhabits a very different world and its romantic ardour and impetuousness were thrillingly caught.

The recital was given on the pianist's own instrument, a Steinway fit for any large concert hall (tuned and voiced on this occasion by Steinway's chief technician who'd travelled up from London especially).

Its tonal fullness and amplitude were wonderful and the range of colours that Alfred Brendel's searching fingers coaxed from it was breathtaking.

The work has eight movements and again with his perceptive sense of musical architecture he judged the pauses between them marvellously so that they became one whole, and his decision to commence its tumultuous opening before the polite applause had ceased was electrifying. This is crazy music, almost expressionist, with alarming switches of mood which were fearlessly brought out. Here even more than anywhere else in the concert I relished the quality of the piano's sound yet it never became too overwhelming in this relatively small hall. I could write endlessly about this performance but to sum it up I was rivetted by its fantasy, by the volatile response to its manic qualities, and equally by the wonderfully expressive playing of the dreamier episodes. This was Schumann in all his fascinating contradictions vividly set before us.

Alfred Brendel has done much to put Schubert's piano sonatas firmly on the musical map as have pupils of his such as Imogen Cooper and Paul Lewis, both of whom have performed at Ilkley.

For this concert he chose to play shorter fare, three of the Moments Musicaux but invested in them the same strong advocacy. Here were tenderness, eloquence and a lovely dancing quality but he never under-plays music that in lesser hands emphasises charm at the expense of depth. Here also, as elsewhere, he achieved daring pianissimos, aided by the magnificent Steinway which allowed such delicacy of touch to speak.

Finally Beethoven from a pianist who has recorded all the sonatas twice and has them at the core of his repertoire.

He gave us the opus 28 Sonata in D major. Writing about this work Donald Tovey challenges the title 'Pastoral' given it by its original publisher: 'a work full of meditation, humour, melancholy and wit - all intensely poetical, but, on the whole, about as pastoral as Jane Austen'(who was a contemporary of Beethoven).

All these qualities cited by Tovey were brought out in abundance in Brendel's reading of this glorious music. But as always with him, together with all the music's depth and expressivity, he unfailingly found the humour.

In the first movement the places where the composer seems to subvert the listener's expectations, right to the throw-away ending dispatched with an impish grin; in the major key central section of the slow movement that contrasts so curiously with the rest; in the whole of the scherzo, Brendel more than most reminding us that the word is Italian for 'joke'; and in the sudden eruptions that disturb the finale's genial progress.

So, a memorable start to the Diamond Jubilee season. They were queuing round the block for tickets in London and Chicago, where tickets cost four or five times as much as they did in Ilkley.

Yet there were a few empty seats, including four in front of me, despite the many entreaties to subscribers to return tickets for re-sale if they were not going to be used. That's hard on the many on the long subscribers' waiting list who were turned away on the night, and for Brendel empty seats are these days an rare phenomenon.