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On my way up to Hampstead to see him it turns two o'clock and a soothing female voice from the taxi-driver's radio, addressing (I think) women of a certain age, assures her audience that "getting older isn't necessarily the end of everything". Examining the statement in its broadest sense, Alfred Brendel counts his blessings and is inclined to agree. After all, 65 is not a great age for a pianist, and it seems evident to me that he retains the capacity to surpass himself. I dare say many people who enjoy his concerts and collect his recordings assume in an unthinking way that he'll go on for ever. It is the end of October: he has just given two performances on consecutive evenings of Mozart's B flat Concerto, K 595 with the LSO and Sir Colin Davis, and looks very well, but at several points during the afternoon he talks of having to accept as inevitable the limitations of physical resources as a musician grows older. He has a delightful way of treating serious matters lightly, and there is nothing downhearted in the way he mentions this, but the information that he won't be playing the Hammerklavier Sonata anymore is a surprise to me. I am unprepared for it and feel a pang of regret, as I expect others will.

His recording career goes back 40 years. Feeling fairly sure of my ground, I suggest that he must be the first pianist to have recorded three complete cycles of the Beethoven sonatas. "That may be so -- I'm not sure whether Kempff completed an early one, pre-war and in the war years, but I never came across more than two or three of the sonatas of that time." Later, I check; Kempff didn't but he did record most of the sonatas on 78s.

"I haven't actually counted how many times I've played Beethoven cycles -- I'm waiting for someone to do a survey! I remember the first one was in London, in 1962, at the Wigmore Hall, and there were eight recitals in three or four weeks including some variation works; and then the next cycle was in Copenhagen which was rather a disaster for various reasons; there was one in Puerto Rico, and then others in more customary places like Vienna and Graz. In London the one I've just finished must be the fourth, if I'm not mistaken, but I sometimes lose count. Not counting the studio one you produced for me at the BBC in the late 1960s, which would make five. Well, I'm delighted people still come and listen to me."

I tried to recall what Brendel had said to me on the phone a while back -- something to the effect that it wasn't a question of trying to find new things in the Beethoven sonatas so much as letting the sonatas speak to him.

"I want the sonatas to tell me what to do. Well, of course one's always finding new things but it's not a question of adopting a new angle, as if one were saying: 'I've done everything wrong, I'm now going in a totally different direction, where I played mezzo-forte I'm now going to play fortissimo, or double the tempo' ... I know this is actually what interviewers want to hear, but I'm afraid I can't oblige! If now I play a movement very differently, which probably has happened, it would be because I find it necessary at the moment, I do it to soothe my conscience in front of the piece, and not just to be different.

"I'm pacified in all this by the reaction of one of my dearest friends, a very old lady who used to study with Fischer and Schnabel, living in America for a long time now: she has heard many of my concerts over the years and what she invariably says is, 'Das hast du aber heute ganz anders gespielt!' [But today you played it quite differently!]. So I don't think I'm capable of playing things exactly alike. Rather, I feel there should be a framework within which one is entitled to move; outside this framework the piece stops making sense. And this is both structural and a matter of character; and I like to look at these things as equally important. Now with structure, some people think they know what I'm talking about, but with character some people don't and keep on asking me, what actually do you mean when you say a Beethoven sonata has its own character? And then I may tell them that I think of people -- of people I know fairly well who have their characteristics, their qualities and maybe their latent possibilities. There's a borderline and one has to find out where it is and within the borderline -- and this applies to a good piece of music -- one can move relatively freely, but if one moves outside -- as if to set a new light or to impose a view on the piece -- then one falsifies it and doesn't do justice to the composer.

"I would also say it was my good fortune to see a lot of productions by Peter Brook and Giorgio Strehler, from the 1950s on, which gave me the notion that one can develop a work from the inside: that a play has to unfold, which is not what usually happens. Now the same applies to a piece of music. My aim when I went back to the sonatas after a longish interval was to see if I could make them speak, almost by themselves, by sifting my previous experience of them and by starting a new chain of experiences, so that a combination of freshness and seasoned insight could enable me to find out what the pieces are about, to receive a message. Now this shouldn't sound too passive -- I don't think I'm a particularly passive player! -- and it shouldn't sound as if I wouldn't volunteer to take the blame for what I'm doing; but there are some moments of happiness when I feel that things are speaking through me, even if this is an illusion."

This is the first time I've heard Brendel develop this train of thought and I tell him I don't think his feeling is illusory at all. I heard all his Beethoven recitals in London bar two, and particularly enjoyed them because I sensed a new freedom of just the kind he described.

"I'm very happy to hear you say that because that's what I sometimes feel myself. The aim is to be freer and yet more accurate. The accuracy means that the details count as much as the whole -- and this is also something that people who are not performers do not understand. There are some performers who have a good overview but who lack the detail, or there are performers who bring details beautifully to light but do not have the big concept and don't know where they really belong and where they come from and where they lead to."