Here on five CDs are Wilhelm Kempff’s complete Decca and DG concerto recordings dating from the 1950s. Most mercurial of musical geniuses, Kempff’s playing created an instantly recognisable aura and ambience, making comparison with other great pianists of the 20th century an exercise in irrelevance. For Alfred Brendel, Kempff was ‘like an Aeolian harp, ever ready to respond to whatever interesting wind blew his way’ and although there was clearly a ground plan behind his interpretations they were marked by an improvisatory charm and pulse that gave a rare individuality to virtually all his performances. Outwardly benign (some considered him cosy, or gemütlich) his playing brimmed over with a colour and nuance worn with an enviable ease and lightness. Unlike so many of his colleagues (Schnabel and Myra Hess, for example) Kempff adored recording and was more than happy to present this or that jewel-like facet of a score for his listener’s endless fascination and delight.

As much as any pianist, Kempff understood that true musical strength and vision come from inner rather than outer physical resource and if his way with Mozart’s B flat Concerto, K450 is surprisingly subdued for music composed ‘to make the pianist sweat’ (Mozart), his taking of its virtuoso contours and patterns by stealth rather than by storm is as vital as it is delicate. Again, the term ‘technique’ takes on an entirely new meaning in Beethoven’s First and Second Concertos. Try the opening of the First’s central Largo and you will wonder at the finest gradations of tone and phrasing and, elsewhere, at a con brio that has nothing to do with driven tempi or high-octane bravura but only with the most concentrated wit and vitality. In the Emperor Concerto, Kempff’s grace and litheness illuminate every bar, and in the Fourth, and most poetic of all the Beethoven concertos, his playing is a marvel of fleetness and understated eloquence.

In the Third Concerto Kempff refuses to sacrifice his pin-point delicacy and precision for drama but even here in music written very much in what EM Forster called ‘Beethoven’s C minor of life’ he still convinces, and it is only in Brahms First and the two Liszt concertos that serious misgivings arise. Indeed it would be hard to imagine when Brahms’s turbulence has been held so determinedly at arm’s length or the Liszt concertos offered in such perverse, strangely muted performances. The march commencing at 3'10" in the A major Concerto seems to turn over and go to sleep rather than blaze into malignant life, and the entire performance is so strenuous and diffident as to provide a chastening reminder that even the greatest artists have their off days when they sound tired, listless (excuse the pun) and disengaged. Fortunately the Schumann Concerto is another story. True, Kempff’s idea of forte can often be little more than a seductive whisper but his Eusebian rapture in the first movement’s A flat episode and what has been called his ‘silken dexterity’ elsewhere making this among the most personal and illuminating of all Schumann Concerto performances.

I can only conclude by saying that at his greatest (as in the majority of the performances in this set) Kempff was a virtuoso in the only sense that matters, one able in Liszt’s words ‘to conjure scent and blossom, and breathe the breath of life’. The DG discs capture his tone (Prussian in its control, Mediterranean in its luxuriance, according to Ingo Harden’s accompanying essay) to perfection while Decca’s sound is more raw and dated. Finally I wish someone would replace the missing opening bar of Mozart’s K450 Concerto, a gap which blunts one’s delectation in this tirelessly brilliant and inventive masterpiece.