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Put out the flags: Alfred Brendel is 70, and this birthday release makes the nicest possible tribute. All the world loves Schubert's great B flat major sonata, and it's far too often committed to CD, but Brendel predictably finds new things to say in this atmospheric--with coughs, sneezes, out-of-tune top notes--live recording. Nothing dramatically different, just a hint of rubato now and then, and a wonderfully measured pace throughout. But the other three sonatas on this double CD are a revelation. They are not often played: their meandering forms and awkward angularities have led many critics to write them off as "unpianistic"--a point Brendel has rebutted in print--and their extraordinary evenness of texture represents a forbidding challenge to interpreters. Yet here they emerge as magnificent. Schubert's penultimate sonata has a slow movement which normally defies all attempts to extract a coherent stream of thought--its hypnotic theme disintegrates into chaotic violence--but Brendel welds its truncations and dislocations into a massive and serene unity. His poetic image of Schubert skirting the precipice "with the assurance of a sleepwalker" is exact: I've seldom been so riveted. --
Michael Church