Wilhe;m Kempff

The name of Wilhelm Kempff is not usually included in the company of the great Chopin pianists of the past and present. Artists such as Rubinstein, Argerich, Moravec, Ohlsson, Cliburn, and others are far more likely to be mentioned as eminent interpreters of the great Polish composer's challenging music. Kempff, who died in 1991 in his ninety-sixth year, was usually associated with the composers of his own Germanic background. When he tackled Chopin he often generated a stir. This release is a reissue of performances from 1958 that will surely bolster his controversial reputation in this repertory, a reputation of an outsider, an individualist who chose to go his own way and eschew traditional approaches.

Five Piano Concertos and the Piano Sonata No. 32, opus 111, recorded in stereo in 1962 and 1964, respectively, by Wilhelm Kempff [1895-1991] and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Ferdinand Leitner [1912-96]. The sonata, the composer’s last, is certainly more than a mere filler, from the opening hesitancy of the ‘Allegro con brio ed appassionato’ to the extended closing section of the second movement.

Before anything else is said, it has to be admitted that the 1963 recording with Mstislav Rostropovich and Sviatoslav Richter is beyond all argument the greatest set of Beethoven's cello sonatas ever recorded. Nevertheless, for the single best recording of Beethoven's cello sonata, it should be this 1965 recording by Pierre Fournier and Wilhelm Kempff. Because while Rostropovich and Richter are the greater virtuosos, their virtuosity is also inevitably the prism through which Beethoven's music radiates and his music is colored by their virtuosity.

The pianist Wilhelm Kempff (1895-1991) belonged to that tradition of German musicians – notably including conductors such as Furtwängler, Klemperer and Walter – for whom composition was hardly less essential a component of their musical personalities than performing, even if it was an activity they largely undertook privately. Working day to day with imperishable masterworks by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, they did not expect to meet such standards, yet their own creative voices required an outlet through more than recreation of others. Left cold by the musical innovations and developments of their own time in the work of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, they wrote in a heightened Romantic idiom, and in genres – especially song and chamber music – which lay separately from their own professional activity as performers.

This disc presents one of the 20th century's greatest and most distinctive pianists in music of two pianist-composers, Schumann and Beethoven, who were among his most treasured specialties. The playing is fluent, brilliant without ever being flashy, and phrased and accented with a totally unique flavor. Kempff has power to spare, but he uses it with a restraint that heightens its impact.