Search - Franz Liszt, Alfred Brendel :: Brendel Plays Liszt, Vol. 2

Impressive in places

Alex | London, United Kingdom | 11/09/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I'm not a Brendel fan. His playing bores me as does his hard-core academic, intellectual, cerebral approach to music. When you're listening to a beautiful melody, do you honestly care whether the performer has researched the original manuscripts in the library of the University of Haden-Baden-Unter-Raden-Kladen? It seems to me that performers who constantly pontificate about the "correct" way to play a piece and the paramount importance of the written note are sort of missing the point and end up turning out lacklustre performances.



So it is in the case of some of the pieces on this CD. La Campanella is technically proficient but utterly uninspiring (compare John Ogdon's recording of it which is full of excitement). But then you do have to take your hat off to some of the performances for their technical brilliance. The Lucia di Lammermoor paraphrase is played magnificently from a technical point of view - great clarity, good tempo, the really difficult left and right hand arpeggios executed perfectly and actually perhaps that is the best way to play this piece. The more "emotional" performances of this piece take liberties with the tempo in order to hide technical weakness. So Brendel does this one justice. He also plays the Norma paraphrase excellently, although this is fundamentally a boring piece. Yes, technically you can't really fault him.



But I still find his playing boring overall. Many people would disagree with me though."