Am I missing something? Long live variety in Chopin playing‚ but why‚ alone among great composers‚ is he still considered free territory by performers who want to shine through him? Artur Rubinstein‚ you should be living at this hour. You conveyed the paramount importance of understanding Chopin’s structural logic as the basis of performance‚ and you put back the dignity into Chopin playing. You would not‚ I think‚ find much dignity in this recital and even fewer revelations of Chopin’s structural logic. At the age Freddy Kempf is now (24)‚ you too pushed the boat out and sometimes failed to bring it into harbour with every note in place and at the right time‚ but we followed you as willing travellers. You knew where you were going. My trouble with Freddy Kempf is that he fails to convey any vision of these pieces beyond the short­term storms and agitations. He is a jumble of effects without causes. His Ballades – and they are personalised‚ very much his – are strung out along a line of tempestuous or vaguely unstable moments. Yes‚ there is fire (and he is always looking for ways to ignite them)‚ and zip‚ and some nice detail‚ but they are a flux of incident and too unfocused to come together as forms in which‚ at the end‚ we feel integration and synthesis have been made manifest as essential goals (No 1 is better than the others‚ apart from the collapsed final chords). These endings are critical. Unleashing a torrent of molten virtuosity is all very well but the transcendental won’t appear out of the incandescent unless prepared for from the beginning of the piece‚ and it’s disappointing that Kempf fails to make these codas summations‚ uniting intensity with direction. For him‚ they are not much more than a Tom­and­Jerry hell­for­leather race to the finish. His version of the Polonaise­Fantaisie‚ though beginning well‚ is similarly flawed. ‘Count the bars in polonaises always in six.’ In the Grande Polonaise in E flat‚ it’s a pity he ignores Chopin’s injunction; he is simply too fast and soon sounds heartless and rather flashy. There have always been players who see the piece as a vehicle for their facility and not much more‚ and as one of Chopin’s last ‘display’ numbers no doubt he himself did. But he would have known how to play a polonaise. The piano is a Yamaha‚ very well recorded. Of course perceptions of Chopin change. I do enjoy returning to this music again and again: as someone said‚ it has so many different structural levels‚ you can hear it in so many different ways‚ and you can move around within it and gain something different each time. But I have to say that only very fitfully have I had that pleasure here.