At 69, Alfred Brendel has discovered Mozart. Which is, to borrow a phrase once used by Brendel himself, "a statement that looks round for applause". And one that is only partly true. The pianist has always played the concertos and is especially pleased with his recent recordings with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
Nevertheless, Brendel is full of the excitement of discovering Mozart's sonatas, which have eluded him for the best part of 60 years. "This is my Mozart period," he says. He pauses. "There is a very good remark by Artur Schnabel about Mozart's sonatas: `Too easy for children. Too difficult for artists.' " He beams a huge smile.
We are talking in the library of Brendel's home in Hampstead in north London, directly above the room in which he practises, with its brace of Steinways and collection of Lisztiana, including a death mask that hovers just above his left hand as he plays. He is on a flying visit home. The previous night he was playing in Vienna; that afternoon he is setting off for Stuttgart. It would have been easier to fly direct, but his daughter is sitting her high school graduation exams and he has been persuaded to spend one night in London. I must not come too early - he is practising. And he must be out of the house by 3 p.m. sharp to make the plane. There is just time to talk.
Some soloists relax a little as they approach old age. Brendel is hardly easing up, though it cannot be for want of laurels on which to rest. He still plays around 90 concerts a year - 90 repetitions of the experience he once described as "the sudden burst of sweat in a spasm of anxiety". Last year saw him performing in 53 towns and cities from Tokyo to Minnesota, from New York, New York to Plush, Dorset.
Eight years ago we could not have had this conversation. It was then that he suffered what he simply refers to as "a sort of crisis". "I had to stop playing because I had pains in my arms and I was not at all sure whether I could continue," he recalls in tones that still have a touch of Austrian formality. "I went to see several doctors, physiotherapists, chiropractors and got more and more desperate because they did not seem to know what they were talking about, until about a year later I found a doctor in Munich who specialises in sports injuries.
"He seems to have helped me. I probably owe him the fact that I am still active and do not feel impeded in what I am doing. But of course I also regulated some of it by changing my repertoire, taking out a few particularly athletic pieces, like the Brahms concertos or the Liszt sonata - pieces I had lived with for a long time.
"I am also playing fewer programmes than before. In my 30s, I think there was one year when I played 13 completely different recital programmes within about 12 months. I am not dreaming of doing that sort of thing again."
Maybe not 13 recital programmes. But in 1999/2000 he played four different recital programmes, three different Mozart concertos, one Beethoven concerto and Schubert's Winterreise with the young German singer Matthias Goerne. The Hamburg doctor does seem to have done the trick. And if giving up Liszt is partly responsible for leading Brendel to Mozart, who would complain?
He explains why he remained aloof from Mozart for so long. "Mozart's sonatas do not have such a good reputation. People think that, beside the piano concertos and Beethoven's sonatas, they are no great shakes, and I must confess that I myself did underestimate some of them before. Well, I take everything back.
"They are in a way the most difficult pieces to play - quite contrary to what people think. Everything is completely exposed. You are all by yourself. You have very few lines to play. It should be poised and seemingly casual at the same time. This is one of the reasons you'll hear Mozart's sonatas so rarely in recital programmes.
"So I told myself, `If I don't do it now, then it may be too late.' There is still - at least in some of my recitals - the control that I want to be there, and at least I give it a try. It's never good enough."
As part of his programme for the NCH on August 15th, Brendel plays the C minor sonata K457. That leads him to talk about his perception that Mozart's sonatas are "not piano works in the narrow sense".
Meaning? "Most great piano pieces are not conceived precisely in terms of the piano sound. They are put on the piano because one player can master a whole piece without the interference of other players. That is the main reason piano literature is so incomparably rich.
"So for me the C minor sonata is much more an orchestral piece than anything else; within 20 years of Mozart's death there were at least three orchestrations. That doesn't show that it needs the orchestra, but it shows how big in scale it is, and what it contains. The point for me is to make some of these latent possibilities manifest on the piano."
Even allowing for self-deprecation, a Mozart sonata surely does not present Brendel with great technical problems? "No," he counters. "People are very wrong when they think that technical difficulties in Mozart are secondary. They are not. They are intimately linked to the psychological understanding of what happens in every single second."
At this stage of Brendel's life, one senses, he invests more energy in working out every piece second by second - certainly more than he did during his 13-programmes-a-year life. And after the preparation comes the culmination of all that effort. This is Brendel's description of what happens once he is up there on stage - white tie, tails, sweat, anxiety: "The piece is first, then there is me who tries to transmit it and the public where it should arrive.
"That means that, sitting in the middle, I have to be in contact with both sides and also with myself as I do contradictory things at the same time, like controlling and losing myself. Like anticipating what I should do next and at the same time taking in what I have played and reacting to it. Like overlooking the whole piece in the way you overlook a landscape and at the same time unfolding it, giving birth to it, starting from the first note like a new experience. Then there is the contradiction of pleasing yourself as much as possible but also thinking of the person in the 30th row and a way of transmitting something into the distance. This is particularly extreme in the American summer festivals when you play for 5,000 or 10,000 people. You are hardly seen by some of these people, and still something has to come across, if possible."
Does it become more or less difficult with age?
"I think I can do certain things better, in terms of control of . . . let us say `ornaments'. But this is also tied to the mind. One gets more experience. One knows more precisely what one should do. One has a wider reach of characterisation of pieces. So it becomes at the same time freer and more accurate. Music-making is full of contradictions. This is one of them."
The state he describes - at the intersection of control and abandon, freedom and accuracy - encourages speculation about the performer's relation to his own conscious and unconscious. Brendel says he has never been tempted to delve too deeply into his own unconscious but does not share the recent tendency to debunk Freud.
"There are three Freudian notions without which I cannot be. One is the unconscious; the second is neurosis; and the third is . . . what is the English word? Depression. They seem so natural and so important to explain certain things. I also admire Freud as a stylist, but in German. He is one of the finest writers of aesthetic prose, if not scientific prose."
He has half an hour before leaving for Stuttgart. Long enough to digress wistfully about only rarely having performed Chopin: "In my next life - in this life my vertebrae will no longer allow it." And about the young pianists he admires: "Till Fellner and Paul Lewis in England. Both, I feel, have the potential to go very far."
And he talks about Plush, the Dorset village where he and his wife Rene have a house and where they recently bought the neighbouring redundant church for $15. His son Adrian has turned it into a centre for music-making and concert-giving. It is also a much-valued retreat for Brendel from the never-ending demands on his time and gifts.
Next year he turns 70. The anniversary programme includes residencies in Vienna, Cologne, Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt and Tokyo, as well as a series of concerts at the South Bank in London. Highlights for next year will also include the complete Beethoven concerto cycle with the Boston Phil and Seiji Ozawa, and another Beethoven cycle with the Vienna Philharmonic and Simon Rattle. There is much sweat, anxiety and wonderful music-making to come.
Alfred Brendel plays at the National Concert Hall, Dublin on August 15th, as part of the Irish Times Celebrity Concert series