The conductor has written a fond tribute to his longtime friend and mentor.
Hard even to know where to start with Alfred: for any musician of my generation he was simply always there, the very definition of integrity and a kind of unique probing humour.
I heard him first in Liverpool, Mozart K482, unforgettable for an impressionable 14 year old. I could never have imagined that my first collaboration with him would be in the same city aged 20. That Beethoven 1st began a long journey of learning and friendship over the next decades. I cannot stress just how much I learned from him, or how painfully obvious it was to me just how steep the climb was to be able to come anywhere near to be an adequate partner for him. I remember so clearly the sense of being kindly but firmly stretched to beyond my level of musicianship. Immense freedom within a strict framework. I am profoundly grateful that he was willing to carry on pulling me upwards for nearly 40 years!
I visited him often in his Hampstead home. I met his friend Isiah Berlin there, terrifying enough on its own, and he said to me,” you know, I don’t think Alfred has ever had an unoriginal thought”, an astonishing but probably accurate observation from an intelligence that could recognize its equal.
Often it was just the two of us, listening and discussing. He was happy to listen to interpretations I brought, as he was with surely countless other musicians, and my scores are full of his insights and recommendations. In the middle of one of my evidently lugubrious accounts of the Eroica Marcia funebre, I wrote down his devastatingly honest comment
“Simon, have you never considered that there might be such a thing as active grief?”
Often it was wisdom about how to turn harmonic corners more eloquently, difficult to achieve but vital for the music. Plus generous, challenging encouragement.Contemporary art, one of his quiet passions, politics, literature were are there in the mix. But his humour, an almost surreal amusement at the world around him that remains the strongest memory of Alfred, and the reason that it is impossible to recall him without smiling, even in this time of sadness.
Finally, the Alfred who, as a young man, famously brought a tortoise onstage with him to walk around the floor, an expression of his inner feelings about the audience. This friendly devil would sometimes make an appearance.
He loathed piped music: in one Birmingham restaurant, he spied a thin wire leading to what seemed to be an unstoppable sound system.
“ I have just the thing” he said, producing a small pair of earthed scissors from his jacket pocket. Seeing our astonishment as he quickly snipped through the wire, he said “Don’t worry, they won’t even notice until tomorrow and it may be weeks before they discover the wire!”
As ever, unique and unexpected. And even the occasional sharp edges deeply loveable.
What a privilege to have had him in our lives.
The post Simon Rattle remembers Alfred Brendel’s tortoise appeared first on Slippedisc.
