Kempff’s art was at its apogee at the time of his 70th birthday in the autumn of 1965; rigour and fantasy held in perfect poise. I heard several of his London recitals over the following three or four years and vividly recall my frustration at missing this one. Not so Bryce Morrison, who has provided the notes for this BBC Legends release. Recalling never-to-be-forgotten recitals by pianists such as Arrau, Samson Francois, Gould and Rubinstein, he adds: ‘Yet if I were to single out one musical experience that transcended all others, it would have to be Wilhelm Kempff’s 1969 Queen Elizabeth Hall recital. At his greatest, as he undoubtedly was on this occasion, Kempff’s playing seemed bathed in a numinous light or halo of sound, his choice of music by Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert seemingly improvised on the spot.’
To take that last point first, Kempff’s programme does indeed bespeak breeding, intelligence and an original turn of mind. The juxtaposition of a pair of ‘forgotten’ sonatas in and around the key of F by Beethoven and Schubert is particularly fascinating. My cynical record-collecting self told me that Kempff had just recorded the Schubert and may have wished to do it live. The same daemon also had me comparing these live performances with Kempff’s former studio recordings. It was a futile exercise. In the first place, context is all. In the second, Kempff was ‘live’ wherever he was. On the one occasion I met and interviewed him, in June 1970, he told me how much he adored recording, waiting like an expectant child for the red light to be switched on. Certainly, his 1964 recording of the Beethoven is every bit as ‘live’ as this live recital (and rather more crisply recorded) but, as I say, that’s hardly the point.
Kempff was a charming man, entirely without side. He told me that he could do astonishingly ‘silly’ things when the mood was upon him. As he said this, his hands fluttering distractedly about his temples, I couldn’t help reflecting that the word ‘silly’ derives from the German ‘selig’, which means blessed. The dividing line between the two has always been a narrow one.
The performance of Op 54 has a wonderful intellectual fluidity. BM writes in his note: ‘One could say that Kempff dissolves the separation between the supposed Apollonian and Dionysian creations of Mozart and Beethoven. With Kempff you simply hear music of a timeless magic, graced, like all great art, with a touch of enigma.’ As Alfred Brendel has remarked in a recent essay (‘Beethoven’s Musical Characters’; New York Review of Books: November 16), ‘this little-loved, highly original work’ establishes two contrasting characters at the beginning, male and female, animus and anima, which the finale brilliantly synthesises. That is Kempff’s understanding of it to a T.
Brendel has said of Kempff, ‘he was an Aeolian harp, ever ready to respond to whatever interesting wind blew his way’. It is a remark that applies especially well to Kempff’s Schubert. He has said that in his early years Schubert’s music was a book with seven seals. He played Schubert Lieder, but it was not until much later, after the First World War, that he entered the private world of the piano sonatas. For him, Schubert’s ‘heavenly length’ was never lengthy if seen in proportion to the larger experience. ‘If length becomes evident as longueur,’ Kempff has written, ‘the fault lies with the interpreter (I speak from my own experience …).’
Not here. The reading is wonderfully taut yet touched with a rare ease of utterance. The enigmatic end is perfectly judged (and well ‘heard’ by an audience whose applause merely stutters into life). After the ‘disconsolate lyricism’ (BM’s phrase) of the sonata, the Drei Klavierstucke offer more or less unalloyed pleasure, Kempff winging the music into life. The playing has charm, dash and magic. He once said of Schubert’s piano music: ‘It ought not to be subjected to the glaring lights of the concert halls, as it is the confession of an extremely vulnerable spirit. Schubert reveals his innermost secrets to us piano-pianissimo.’ We hear this wonderfully well in Kempff’s playing of the first of his two encores, the Impromptu in G flat, where his fabled cantabile comes even more mesmerisingly into its own. An Aeolian harp indeed!
At the start of the recital, Kempff provides a shrewdly voiced, somewhat Mendelssohnian account of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue. It is a performance to free the fingers and light the way ahead, the great work assuming the role of warm-up man with as good a grace as can be expected.'