Kempff was already almost 63 when recording these works some 33 years before he died. With his essentially Germanic musical background and training, he offers a more forthrightly masculine and urgently driven Chopin than the hypersensitive romantic dreamer we so often meet, as the surging opening movement of the Second Sonata at once makes plain. No sentimental rubato weakens the song so eloquently continued by his left hand, or the purity of the consolation brought by his right hand, in the trios of the Scherzo and Funeral March movements respectively – the latter unforgettable for Kempff’s ominous emphasis of bass sonority in the reprise. But the finale, while meticulously clear, is marginally too slow to sound haunted. In one or two of this work’s more vehement climaxes, like those of the Barcarolle, there is some slight thickening, even coarsening, of texture.
Kempff compensates with delectable delicacy in the Berceuse and the Nocturne, likewise in the magic ‘waterfalls’ of the C sharp minor Scherzo and the gracefully streaming right-hand tracery of the Impromptus – all four of them so refreshingly free from drawing-room coquetry. There’s a trace of plumminess in the close recording, but the remastered sound is always round and warm.'