“The quality of Brendel’s alertness — his sensual intellectuality or his intellectual sensuality, whatever it is — is breathtaking; and it is refined, solidified, by technique and scholarship and reflection, so that he never falls back solely upon the force of his own subjectivity. Like all musicians, he is an interpreter, but he is not another jolly manufacturer of “interpretations.” It is the music itself that Brendel desires to disclose. He believes that at the piano he can narrow the distance from the real. Brendel’s pianism is neither personal nor impersonal. That is its uncanny achievement.”