Brendel is celebrated in a glorious evening of music full of silliness, great playing and warm affection | Alfred Brendel

Pianist, poet, polymath, and one of music’s most rigorous intellectuals and most mischievous minds – Alfred Brendel, who died in June, was an artist productive of contradictions. This marathon party, on his 95th birthday, celebrated them with warm affection.

The music reflected Brendel’s own emotions, and skewed toward classical repertoire. It began with Haydn’s representation of the chaos of creation; But the words of the evening came later. The orchestra was an ad hoc group of Brendel’s colleagues, followers, and friends, and included prominent orchestral and chamber musicians—and, in the case of Brett Dean, a composer returning to his former persona as a viola player. They responded enthusiastically to Simon Rattle’s conducting, leaning into waves of sound or retreating to the softest piano.

All proceeds went to the Alfred Brendel Young Musician’s Trust, which gives students access to professional-level pianos. This was not an opportunistic fundraiser, and the general lack of speeches made the atmosphere less respectful. The music really did the talking. So too are many pianists who have looked to Brendel as a mentor. Imogen Cooper joined the orchestra and soprano Lucy Crowe in Mozart’s aria What’s wrong with this…; Later, Tim Horton duetted with Brendel’s son Adrian, the cellist, in a highly felt rendition of Liszt’s Elegy No. 2, and Till Fellner and Paul Lewis collaborated on Schubert’s A minor Allegro, D947.

There was (seemingly) unplanned humour: some running humor involving the six pianists and their numerous piano benches, which are clearly not as interchangeable as you might think; And for a moment we weren’t sure whether to applaud András Schiff’s arrival on stage to play JS Bach or his return to his seat in the audience for the evening’s intrepid page-turner – a familiar face to Brendel fans in London. The musical comedy mostly worked, too: not so much the enigmatic piece of Mauricio Cagel’s “Three Left Hands” that briefly united Rattle, Horton and Pierre-Laurent Aimard on piano, but Brendel would have been pleased that the sold-out audience eagerly fell for Haydn’s false finale to the finale of his Symphony No. 90, not once but twice. A series of dryly humorous poems by Brendel, interspersed with miniatures by Kurtag and Ligeti, emerge thanks to the contrast between Harriet Walter’s delivery and Aymard’s controlled silliness at the piano.

In surreal fashion, this scene is bookended by a small, military-style band – dressed in crimson coats, epaulettes and bearskin hats – playing two of Kagel’s “Marches to the Failure of Victory”, in a chaotic, meticulously written manner. Perhaps it was also surreal that this would flow so well into the tense darkness that opens Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, the final work, with a solo by Lewis full of heaviness and conviction.

However, for many, the highlight of the evening will be the slow movement of Schubert’s C major Quintet, played by the Takacs Quartet as well as Adrian Brendel. It’s a piece in which you feel like the melody is missing in some way, and it speaks gently but powerfully not just of absence, but of acceptance and gratitude as well. He said all of those things eloquently here, and more.