Private Passions

Alfred Brendel is one of the great musicians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He's renowned for his masterly interpretations of the works of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Liszt and Beethoven; in fact he was the first performer to record the complete solo piano works of Beethoven.Alfred Brendel gave his first public recital in Graz at the age of only 17, in 1948, and went on performing around the world for more than sixty years. Since his retirement in 2008 he has relished the chance to teach young musicians, and to spend more time going to exhibitions, reading and writing; he has published six volumes of essays and two collections of his own poetry.In Private Passions he talks to Michael Berkeley about the composers and musicians he admires, and looks back at his early life. It wasn't a musical childhood; the family had no record player, but his mother used to sing cabaret songs. And later, as a teenager, his father managed a hotel and he discovered a stack of LPs, all operettas. The War made a