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“... alone In your office. Today I’d haul my piano In medias res And play Like Géza Anda, Like Alfred Brendel, Like Frédéric Chopin, Like Claude Debussy, Like all the alphabet Of subtle pianists So impossibly When we kissed It would make us both cry. 50 Be my Harley, my girly, paunchess roadie, So I can launch my fifty-something boy band: I need you ...”

“... variation in the intensity and tone colour separately allotted to them. Yet it was possible for Alfred Brendel to remark in 1976: ‘pianists are about to lose the skill of “polyphonic playing”, once held in high esteem, a loss that makes itself felt not only in Bach, and not only in dense contrapuntal structures.’ He was discussing ‘Bach and ...”

“... to keep us at it. Of course, the city affords more refined and elegant pleasures. May was Alfred Brendel month: he played his Beethoven sonata cycle in seven recitals spread over about three weeks. I was at the first and the last. In between, despite the habitual coolness of some reviewers, there had evidently been a triumph, and for the seventh ...”

“... Spencer) are well chosen to illustrate the man and his aesthetic attitudes. The goal of the book, Alfred Brendel says in his Foreword, is to allow readers ‘to paint their own portrait of Liszt’. It is, of course, an illusory goal, since no amount of raw historical information can sidestep the necessity for critical historical judgment. But no ...”

“... Baker, David Mellor, Alan Bennett. There are a few outers: Jonathan Miller, Stephen Spender, Alfred Brendel, Melvyn Bragg – but even in these he is good on the hair, which, according to Craig Brown, was what he always homed in on. Rosemary Sayigh, Boxer’s sister, provides the most intimate of the recollections. In 1931, when Mark was born, the ...”

“... with him. Of the 14 essays and one poem (by Stephen Spender) three have previously been published. Alfred Brendel writes about humour in music, Francis Haskell on controversies about the transition from Late Roman to Early Christian art; Bernard Williams, in a wonderful and unsummarisable essay called ‘Naive and Sentimental Opera Lovers’, writes about ...”

“... There is, in the final lecture, a fascinating account of what it was like to listen to Alfred Brendel playing the Brahms Piano Variations, Op. 18, a work he had not known, though he at once realised its connection with the String Sextet in B flat. He subtly distinguishes between that experience, and the experience of listening, in the same ...”

“... foibles and frailties. At dinner one night this philistine meets ‘the wife of a famous pianist (Alfred Brendel): she is surprised I have never heard of him’. Nor, on first encounter, has the man who knows everybody heard of Tony O’Reilly, either as an Irish wing-threequarter or in his later position as head of the Heinz organisation. Yet when ...”

“... at us? Or telling us nothing, having decided to take the money and run? There’s a poem by Alfred Brendel in which a woman asks him if he is Woody Allen. He says he’s Charlemagne, but the woman doesn’t believe him. Marion Meade tells a similar story about Allen himself. Someone she calls ‘an elderly dowager’ asks him if he is Woody ...”

“... the Well-Tempered Clavier, most of the Art of Fugue – became almost the core of the repertoire. Brendel, Pollini, Barenboim and Martha Ageriach were consolidating their presence at the same time but none of them had a common border with Gould’s Bach. It was as if he had re-invented the idea of what it meant to be a pianist, but had done it in such a way ...”