We hope that some of you classical music fans heeded our advice in last Sunday’s Classical Music Agenda and went to hear renowned pianist Alfred Brendel at the Kennedy Center last night. I was there, enjoying two hours of concentrated musical bliss, thanks to the Washington Performing Arts Society, which had brought him to Washington for twelve concerts before this one. Brendel is one of the most widely recorded pianists of all time, and he is still performing regularly and extraordinarily well at age 75. He grew up in Austria and the former Yugoslavia, and although he has played all kinds of music, he is particularly known for his interpretations — intellectual, wry, technically flawless, sensitive — of the music of classical Vienna, especially Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart. In other words, precisely the music on the program last night.

Acknowledging the warm applause at his entrance but not milking it as a flashier performer would do, Brendel launched right into the simple phrases of the first of two Haydn sonatas on the program, Hob. XVI:42. This little two-movement work whirled by gracefully in Brendel’s hands, a perfect sonic canvas of delicate sworls, bright melodic tone, and whirring flourishes. Yes, there are minuscule chinks in Brendel’s technical armor from time to time these days — unlike Maurizio Pollini, who will be coming back to the Kennedy Center on May 17 — but Brendel almost always gives a polished, well-conceived, and above all else musically sensitive reading, especially in works of this style.