![]() ![]() ![]() When he was three, his father abandoned his profession as an architect and took the family to the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia on a resort island called Krk, he ran a hotel. He was born in 1931 in Wiesenberg, a locale in Moravia that now belongs to the Czech Republic but at the time of his birth was home to many German-speaking peoples. Scott Cantrell, writing for High Fidelity a decade later, concurred: “In an age supposedly devoted to the mediagenic, Brendel has broken all the rules. “Perhaps no other pianist of our time has so willfully avoided the ordinary channels to success and formulas for stardom and still arrived at the top of his profession, ” wrote Bernard Holland in a 1977 New York Times article. ![]() Furthermore, his performance repertoire is lacking in the more popular classics that are regarded as “crowd-pleasers, ” and onstage Brendel is quite restrained in demeanor. A name chiefly familiar to fans of classical music only, Brendel is far removed from the stereotype of the eccentric, flamboyant concert pianist in the vein of Arthur Rubinstein or David Helfgott. ![]() By the 1990s, Alfred Brendel was regarded as the foremost living classical pianist in the world. ![]()
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