Alfred Brendel
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 22 November 1971
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway is the classical pianist, Alfred Brendel.
A performer of world renown, his career spans seven decades, and he is particularly famous for his interpretations of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt. An Austrian who's lived in the UK for many years, he was born in 1931 in what is now the Czech Republic. Although not from a musical family, he began playing the piano aged six and gave his first recital aged 17. Largely self-taught, in addition to his live performances, he's enjoyed a long and successful recording career. Revered for his intellect and individual and original take on the world, he is also a published poet and essayist.
He says, "I regard pessimism as a sign of intelligence. Optimism is a very welcome and life-enhancing feature, a gift, but not necessarily a realistic outlook. I am a pessimist who enjoys being pleasantly surprised."
Producer: Cathy Drysdale.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne, and this is the Desert |
| 0:07.2 | Island Disks podcast. This is the only extract the BBC has of this episode, and for right |
| 0:12.4 | reasons, the music is shorter than on the original broadcast. The presenter is Roy Plumley. |
| 0:18.1 | I hope you enjoy listening. That's of course not enough. What would you be happy |
| 0:24.4 | used to have got away from? To got away from from the telephone maybe. Yes, yes, you |
| 0:29.6 | were certainly a long way from that. What's been your guiding principle in choosing these |
| 0:34.0 | eight records? Great music, great performances, personal nostalgia. I suppose a combination of |
| 0:40.2 | all of them, but as I happen to be a performer, it is of course important that the performances |
| 0:50.0 | suit me and that I could imagine to live with them for a while, and indeed I have |
| 0:55.6 | lived with most of them for several years. What's the first one, you, Jason? The first one |
| 1:03.6 | is a record of Madrigal's by Jesualdo, whom I enormously adore one of the genius composers, |
| 1:09.2 | which are hardly known to the public, I wish that would change. |
| 1:50.0 | The Jesualdo magical in Bandunque sang by the NCRV vocal ensemble of |
| 2:19.8 | Helvism. What's your second record? The well-tempered piano by John Sebastian Bach is played by |
| 2:28.6 | my teacher Edwin Fischer. This is a reverence not only to the great composer, but to my own |
| 2:38.4 | profession as a pianist and to my great teacher, whose piano style is something I've always |
| 2:51.1 | enormously admired. It has a timeless simplicity in its best examples, which has remained Fischer's |
| 2:59.9 | personal secret. Which one should we hear? I think the prelude in B minor of the first book. |
| 3:08.4 | I think the prelude in B minor of the first book is played by the NCRV vocal ensemble of |
| 3:20.4 | B minor of the first book. I think the prelude in B minor of the first book is played by |
| 3:32.3 | the NCRV vocal ensemble of the first book. I think the prelude in B minor of the first book is played |
| 3:43.2 | by the NCRV vocal ensemble of the first book. I think the prelude in B minor of the first book is played |
... |
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