By the age of 31 William Kapell had already established a considerable reputation in the musical world: he had won major prizes at 19, and subsequently had become much sought after as a concerto soloist. Then in 1953, returning from an Australian tour, he was killed in a plane crash near San Francisco: his death robbed the world of a pianist considered by a musician like Virgil Thomson (a eulogy from whom is reprinted here) to be maturing into greatness.
It pains me to have to report that not much on this disc bears out that high opinion. It is true that he is heard in recordings that range from the inferior to the abominable: the Sixth Hungarian Rhapsody in 1942 (the year after his debut) in wiry sound taken from a broadcast, on a noisy-surface acetate; the 1947 Mozart (for the American Armed Forces Radio) close-balanced over heavy bass rumble; the 1951 recordings (in Buenos Aires) coarse and with distortion, a horrible scratch right across the disc face in two of the Debussy pieces and a drop-out of a few bars in the ''Golliwog's cakewalk''; and there's a colossal sneeze into the mike in the Eleventh Hungarian Rhapsody. None of which makes for pleasurable listening; but it might just be tolerated if the playing were really superlative. However, the 1942 Liszt, though it has vigour and spirit, is far from free of conspicuous flaws and mis-hits; the semiquavers in the first movement of the Mozart are scurried and not cleanly articulated, and the Adagio is wooden; the Bach Allemande is swooningly ultra-romanticized and the Courante (harshly metallic in sound) brutally violent. Only parts of the Eleventh Hungarian Rhapsody and the Mussorgsky Pictures worthily illustrate Kapell's real quality; the rest of the CD does little service to his memory.'