Unless the audience is made up of sentimentalists or modernists,
Mozart recitals don't get any better than this.
Alfred Brendel's
Mozart is clear and objective, absolutely translucent, and technically impeccable. But everyone prays differently and
Brendel's devotion to the integrity of the music is his path to the sublime. The radiant trill in the recapitulation of the Andante con espressione of the Sonata in D major, the abysmal collapse at the center of the Adagio in the Fantasie in D minor, the simple bliss of the Rondo of the Sonata in F major: all of these are transcendentally beautiful because they are extraordinarily lucid.
Brendel plays the Sonata in A minor as if it were a block of marble and he was sculpting a Pietà with severity and greatest sympathy. Philips puts
Brendel's piano in the room with the listener.