Concertos pour piano

Description

“Damn!” Wilhelm Kempff is said to have exclaimed during one of those Beethoven sessions in the 1930s: at the infernal tempo he had chosen, a passage from the Hammerklavier refused to come off. It must be said that his winged, lightning-fast playing was highly risky for the 78 rpm recording, which forbade editing and was stingy with repeats: the first take had better be the right one, otherwise too bad for the artist! Despite the dangers, Kempff, then in his forties, cut nothing, neither in his tempos nor in his willingness to take risks in seeking to make the pianos here so light and so ringing, and the result is transcendent: no longer a keyboard, but a lyre, an Aeolian harp. The sonority is magical from start to finish, the touch unreal, the rebounds of an elf, yet everywhere an eruptive character prevails, showing the improvisatory genius that Beethoven brought to his piano. The double album of the Concertos is a little less imperishable than that of the Sonatas (APR 6018), marred by an Emperor driven with a hatchet by Peter Raabe, and despite a striking 4th in which Van Kempen stretches the discourse, especially since Kempff and the Dutch conductor would later reunite to record the complete set in the LP era, but all the same one cannot ignore them, first testimonies of a pianist who embodies and shapes them with that touch from another planet (Discophilia - Artalinna.com). (Jean-Charles Hoffelé)