Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Chamber Music: Professor Alfred Brendel

The pianist, Alfred Brendel, is to be the inaugural Humanitas Visiting Professor in Chamber Music at the University of Cambridge, from 13 to 18 May 2011. He will give a series of public lectures as well as attending an open rehearsal and concert with the Szymanowski Quartet. Humanitas is a series of Visiting Professorships at Oxford and Cambridge intended to bring leading academics and practitioners to both universities to address major themes in the arts, social sciences and humanities. Managed and funded by the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, it is co-ordinated in Cambridge by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). The Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Chamber Music 2011 has been made possible by the generous support of Mr. Lawrence Saper. Since Alfred Brendel's retirement from concert performances in 2008, he has continued to work all around the world with young musicians and given lectures, poetry readings and masterclasses in London's Wigmore Hall, Hamburg, Paris, at Zurich University, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, with the Berlin Philharmonic, and at Berkeley and Harvard Universities. Alfred Brendel was the first pianist to record Beethoven's complete piano works.