Miraculous recordings from a great master

 Wilhelm Kempff: Bach, Mozart, Schubert & Schumann

This welcome historic release from APR Recordings includes Wilhelm Kempff's complete recordings for Polydor of music by Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Schumann, made in the period 1927 to 1936. We have here nearly 75 minutes of music, which together make for an appealing recital.

Indeed, though I know Kempff primarily through his recordings of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas, I would find almost anything the great pianist plays to be appealing. But there's something special about these recordings, something quite miraculous. In spite of the relatively primitive technology involved in these early electrical recordings, I had no trouble at all forgetting sonic imperfections, and zeroing in on a great master channeling great composers. The French Suite no. 5 of Bach, recorded in 1935, is the highlight of the disc; it's a masterful interpretation. I was in awe of this from the first time I heard it, since I had the strong feeling that Kempff was communicating his own awe, as he so often does with Beethoven, before a great masterwork.

I was quite surprised by Kempff's interpretation of Mozart's Piano Sonata in A major, K. 331, recorded in 1935. It seems much more modern than I would have expected, with crisp, carefully delineated lines, and no hint of the romanticizing prettiness that plagued Mozart music of the period. While not completely Historically Informed, this performance once again demonstrates a real, personal connection between pianist and composer.

There are a number of Kempff transcriptions here, including some Bach pieces that have entered the repertoire of many pianists, and a very clever reworking of Liszt's version of Schubert's "Hark, Hark, the Lark!". The disc ends with a beautiful dream: Schumann's Träumerie, recorded in 1936.

I've characterized the piano playing of Wilhelm Kempff as a miracle, but there's another, albeit smaller, miracle involved in this release. It's quite amazing that one can listen to all of this music with little acoustic worries. That's a testament to the state-of-the-art German engineering behind the recordings themselves, but also, of course to work since then by the Producer and Audio Restoration Engineer for this project, Mark Obert-Thorn. The many years between recording and listening seem simply to vanish.

Stephen Siek's liner essay is first-rate, mixing in technical details, but making sure that storytelling prevails. Learning about Kempff's 1934 trip to Buenos Aires on the Graf Zeppelin adds a great deal to the charm of the entire project.

This disc will be released March 4, 2022.

Urgent, passionate, transcendent piano music

 

Andrew Von Oeyen: Bach & Beethoven Piano Works

"Something about this music just seemed to make sense now, when so little else did."

It's fitting, I think, that I come back to reviewing music on this blog after my annus horribilis, when my wife died of Ovarian cancer and I had a major accident, all during the terrible pandemic that we're slowly emerging from. Pianist Andrew Von Oeyen's year was a challenging but productive one, resulting in a shift in his musical priorities, and it brings us a quite remarkable album of music by Bach and Beethoven.

Von Oeyen came to Bach, or perhaps more accurately, Bach came to Von Oeyen, during enforced leisure, with touring, public performance and normal recording activities on hold:

While I had studied many of his keyboard works, I almost never performed them; I was not a specialist. Yet his music was calling, and with a newfound liberty of time to explore repertoire without professional deadlines, I decided to bury my troubles in his contrapuntal canon.

That this was a kind of Saul in Tarsus moment for the pianist is clear from his taught and concentrated performance of the Overture in the French Style, BWV 831. This is just the opposite of the dry Bach that still holds sway over some pianists; Von Oeyen plays with urgency and passion. He comes through these emotions to a calm centre, though he doesn't quite reach the same Olympian serenity of that most urgent and passionate of all pianists, Glenn Gould. Still, this is a superb version of this great work that seems better each time I listen to it.

Von Oeyen's Beethoven is equally stormy, and just as convincing. He found that "the directness, virility, determination, and sheer willpower of Beethoven... aligned with my own growing resolve to transcend this trial." This is Von Oeyen shaking his fist at COVID as Beethoven famously shook his at Fate. The Appassionata Sonata, op. 57, is the perfect work to demonstrate how one person can fight the good fight against the Universe, though of course it also takes enormous control, and self-control, to keep it from sounding melodramatic and histrionic. The slighter Sonata Quasi Una Fantasia, op. 27 no. 1 is pitched at a lower temperature, and to his credit, Von Oeyen doesn't push too hard and destroy the still somewhat naively pre-Romantic feeling of this wonderful piece. This is beautifully balanced, and beautifully played.

Von Oeyen ends a wonderful programme with two Bach arrangements by that great Beethoven pianist, Wilhelm Kempff. I've always thought of Kempff as my Beethoven pianist, since I first heard Beethoven's sonatas played by him. Kempff brings loads of sentiment to these pieces, and in turn Von Oeyen plays both with simple dignity and a feeling of transcendence. Perhaps there is some light ahead.

To be released June 11, 2021.

A fine pianist's spirit comes through

I'm slowly turning into a bit of a historic recordings buff, in spite of myself.  Last year I really enjoyed listening to the APR release of the 8 late Beethoven sonatas Wilhelm Kempff recorded in Germany during the war years. Here now are 16 earlier sonatas recorded on 78rpm records in 1940, 41 and 43. There is the same meticulous discography, down to the matrix numbers, indispensible to historic recording buffs of a deeper understanding than me. Also we have a superb long essay by Bryce Morrison about Kempff, and an essay on the recordings from Michael Spring. Kempff recorded this music a lot; the Pathetique, for example, in 1924, 1928, 1929 and 1936 before the 1940 recording here; the Appassionata in 1924, 1928 and 1932 before the 1943 recording on this disc. The fact that these works often sound so completely different from the 1964/65 stereo LP set I know so well, and the 1950s mono set I've listened to since, is typical of Kempff's spontaneity and his ever-evolving interpretation of this music.

Once again there are caveats about the sound. These are in some cases actually worse than the pre-war recordings because of the war-time quality of materials used to press the discs. But the spirit of Kempff comes through, and this pianist's spirit is central to his art.

Medium and message in Beethoven's piano sonatas

"We are homesick most for the places we have never known."
     - Carson McCullers

I don't normally listen to this kind of historical release, but this new double album (to be released August 26, 2016) from Britain's APR Recordings has plenty of musical interest, and there are a number of nostalgia hooks for this baby boomer. This is in spite of the fact that I didn't come across Wilhelm Kempff until his third wave of Beethoven sonata cycle recordings: the stereo releases from the mid-1960s, which followed the mono ones of the mid-1950s, and the partial cycle on 78rpm recordings from the 20s and 30s, a generous selection of which are included in this release. I've talked before about the importance of Kempff's cycle in my early discovery of Beethoven, but like the LP-toting hipster of today, this is also about a medium that pre-dates even my advanced years: the 78 rpm record. I am old enough to remember the thrill of holding a heavy disc in my hand, even if it was by then from far in the past, and hearing the pops and clicks and steady hiss along with a sound that was more compressed and limited than we're used to then or today, but often somehow fuller and richer at the same time.

We perhaps take for granted the sterling work of the early recording restoration specialists; it's quite remarkable how much piano sound there is in the best of these tracks, and even in the worst of them, the 1928 acoustic recording of op. 101. The Kempff style comes through loud and clear: more lyrical than histrionic; more thoughtful than dramatic; more Greek, as they say in the Sicilian portion of The Godfather, than Italian. The recording technology of the mid 1930s was good enough that you can listen to the sonata op. 110 (recorded in July of 1936) and at some point completely forget the provenance of the recording. Let's not forget to praise the re-mastering again! There are even some musical advantages to these early recordings: a fresh and spontaneous feeling that comes with a bit of the pioneer spirit. Three of these sonatas (op. 81a, 90 and 101) are the very first to be put on record by any artist. To be sure there are drawbacks beyond the sound: the lack of repeats (which allows the longer sonatas to fit on fewer records) emphasizes what some have argued is a lack of gravitas in Kempff's playing, especially in the slow movements. And the short playing time of each record side (the Hammerklavier was on five 78s, or 10 sides) meant some sonata movements were divided into chunks during the recording process, which militates against the presentation of a coherent architecture for Beethoven's awesomely large musical structures. But technology isn't everything - the critical consensus is that Kempff's mono cycle not only is a greater interpretation, but even sounds better than the stereo made the following decade. These performances are a valuable portrait of the early days of recording and of a Beethoven genius, and they're a blast to listen to.