Brendel Alfred

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Alfred Brendel (born January 5, 1931) is an Austrian pianist, born in Czechoslovakia. He is widely regarded as one of the great classical pianists of the second half of the 20th century. Brendel was born in Vízmberk (German Wiesenberg, now Loučná nad Desnou), Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) into a non-musical family. They moved to Zagreb when Brendel was six, and later to Graz. They lived there during World War II, towards the end of which the fourteen year old Brendel was sent to Yugoslavia to dig trenches. However, he caught frostbite and was taken to hospital. Throughout his childhood, Brendel had occasional piano lessons, but otherwise little formal music education. After the war, Brendel composed music, as well as continuing to play the piano and paint. He never had any more formal piano lessons, however, and although he did attend masterclasses with Edwin Fischer and Eduard Steuermann, he is largely self-taught. Brendel gave his first public recital in Graz at the age of seventeen. He called it "The Fugue In Piano Literature", and as well as fugal works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms and Franz Liszt, it included some of Brendel's own compositions. However, he gave up composing shortly after this to concentrate on the piano. In 1949 he won 4th prize in the Ferruccio Busoni Piano Competition in Bolzano, Italy and moved to Vienna the following year. At the age of 21, he made his first record, Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 5. He went on to make a s

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