Philip Hope-Wallace once suggested in these columns that the newest, Giulini-conducted, Don Giovanni was worth a year at a foreign university. Whilst still at university, I bought Kempffs 1965 set of the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas and concluded then and there that it was worth at least two years at any university. To this day, I don't think I ever made a more significant purchase in the record line. For not only is this the finest piano music ever written, Kempff s playing of it has been matched in complete recorded cycles only by Schnabel and Arrau; and as a vade mecum I would always turn to Kempff for the unfailing rigour and lucidity of his playing (Bach's music, one feels, was the proving ground of his art, as it was for Beethoven) and for the peculiarly transcendental temper of both his mind and his technique.
What a joy it is, then, to see these performances beginning to reappear in CD transfers which usefully alter one's perception of sound that on LP seemed bright but lacking in weight and which emerges here as having great power (trenchancy is probably the word) in all registers, though, as always with Kempff, the upper registers strikingly predominant. (Arrau, you might say, digs deep sonically, Kempff scales the heights.)
In their different ways, Schnabel, Arrau and Kempff are all, quite literally, incomparable. Submit Kempffs very Bachian account of the Tempest or his equally Bachian Hammerklavier to the lethal process of comparative reviewing and both falter. Other pianists 'colour' the Tempest more persuasively and few, thank goodness, have the temerity to cut the repeat of the Hammerklavier's exposition and with it the eletric switch to B flat, second time round, the comparably electric switch to B natural; a process that is central to the piece structurally and dramatically with the potent opposition of B flat and B natural in the larger scheme of things. Kempff can do that, unforgivably, and take a fairly steady view of the sonata's opening Allegro and yet still produce a performance of such energy, brilliance and intellectual vigour as to waylay most criticism.
I am only sorry that Kempff's own notes which he wrote for the 1965 cycle are not being reprinted. His words, like his playing, which they specially complement, are steeped in that special blend of logic and poetry which are so typical of his whole art and personality. Perhaps the best all round account of the Hammerklavier currently available on CD is the Pollini (DG CD 419 1992GH2, 12/86, coupled with other late sonatas), though I have recently been greatly taken by Brendel's exceptionally fine live Queen Elizabeth Hall performance (Philips CD 412 723-2PH, 7/86)'