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Starting a new season of Music Matters, Tom Service talks - in a rare interview - to one of the most respected musicians of our time: pianist Alfred Brendel. Despite retiring from the concert hall in 2008, he’s regarded as one of the major interpreters of Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart. Brendel, now 84, has always been a deep thinker and an insightful writer on music, as well as a poet - literature is his second passion after music. Tom discusses music, art and life with Brendel at a time when the pianist is publishing 'Music, Sense and Nonsense', a new book of collected essays and lectures. Surrounded at his house by works of art and objects from around the world, Brendel describes himself as ‘aesthetic person, somebody who thinks that aesthetic matters justify the existence’, although he’s quick to say that he’s not an intellectual, just ‘a musician who also thinks’.  His perennial quest for knowledge and answers to aesthetical and intellectual questions always informed his performing, he explains, using emotions as the filters that eventually bring music to live. He condemns the attitude of ‘some people, musicians and also theatre directors who think that a work of art is clay in their hands, which they could give whichever form they just fancy’ and calls for more respect towards the work of art. Also, Brendel, defending the interpretations of all repertoire on the piano, is highly critical of the way the ‘historically-informed’ movement has established what he sees as performance dogmas, impoverishing pieces, and says that the time when ‘there was an orthodoxy of which instruments can be used and which can’t I think has passed.’  

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