Plus: NFAK; Alfred Brendel
| In the first hours of Israel’s war on Iran, my friends and family in the country gave voice to a deep exhaustion and despair. The Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan earned fans the world over. For decades they have debated just what he stood for. America is an occupied country, ruled by partisans hostile to democracy. Over the past twenty months, has the Israeli Medical Association upheld medical ethics and international law? The pianist Alfred Brendel died this week, aged ninety-four. Largely self-taught, he became one of the most well-known classical musicians of the twentieth century, performing everywhere from the Berlin Philharmonic to Carnegie Hall, where in 1983 he played all thirty-two of Beethoven’s piano sonatas in one season. Brendel was also a writer and poet, and, beginning in 1985, he contributed eleven essays and two poems to the pages of The New York Review, including, in our November 16, 2000, issue, a consideration of the character of Beethoven’s music. Acknowledging the vogue for more formal criticism of classical music, Brendel reminded readers that even composers as seemingly clinical as Arnold Schoenberg relied on atmosphere, mood, and “poetic associations.” “Every good performance of a work,” Brendel wrote, “needs its breath of fresh air, so that the music does not suffocate as if under a bell jar.” “It is the interpreter’s responsibility to play the roles of different characters. Like every person, it would seem, every sonata has distinct qualities and potentialities. Each character lives and breathes as a sum of its attributes. If the interpreter goes beyond the boundaries of these attributes, a character would be falsified and ill-portrayed.” Special Offer
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