Customer Reviews

Freddy Kempf Plays Chopin

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I eagerly purchased this disk after reading an interview of Daniel Pollack in Clavier magazine. Pollack specifically mentioned Freddy Kempf as the most singularly talented young pianist facing the public today. He noted that Kempf didn't do as well in competitions because of their tendency to select for those pianists who are conservative enough to simultaneously appeal to the widely varying tastes of the jury. Pollack noted that Kempf brought a bold and interesting perspective to his playing, and I looked forward to this disk as an opportunity to hear someone with a unique pianistic voice.

I would agree that Kempf is unique. He had some unusual tempo choices and shifts in each of the Ballades. Many of his choices struck me as interesting, but left me cold. I felt the opening tempos for both the F major and f minor Ballades were too fast, almost as if he were eager to get to some more technically demanding material. There was an agogic slow-down in the transition to the second section of the g minor Ballade that, again, was interesting but not emotionally compelling.

He has a very competent technique, and was able to handle all the technical difficulties with apparent ease. His F major Ballade closed at a tempo faster than any other performance I've heard. It was quite exciting, though it only barely compensated for the rather perfunctory opening.

The stereo sound is first-rate, maybe even demonstration class. All the performances were skillful, but they don't compel repeated listenings the way performances by Rubinstein, Zimerman, Emanuel Ax or some other pianists' do. Still, this CD offers an excellent opportunity to sample the artistry of this up and coming young pianist in familiar and accessible repertoire.

Somehow the German-English pianist Freddy Kempf (spelled differently form the renowned Wilhelm Kempff, if anyone is in doubt) has turned himself into a love-him-or-hate-him figure. No one argues against Kempf's dazzling technique, which is brought to the forefront, both for good and ill. I like a previous reviewer's phrasing when he says that Kempf manages to be pretentious and puerile at the same time. You may find both words too string, but here in big works like the First Ballade, Kempf goes for broke on the grandest scale of sound and emphasis, yet the overall effect can seem puerile because it misses so much of Chopin's inwardness and nuance.

In fact, this is often bellicose Chopin playing, at a far remove from Moravec and Perahia, two pianists who are at once poetic and gentlemanly. There have been some recent firebrands, of course, like Argerich and Pogorelich, who emphasize Chopin's alternate personality as a romantic revolutionary and Polish nationalist. Kempf's hot-headedness evokes that aspect, but unfortunately his lyrical playing can be foursquare and dull, as in the opening to the Second and Fourth Ballade. Given his recklessness in th florid passages, why is he so rhythmically strict, to be point of abandoning rubato, where Chopin is most poetic?

That's the conundrum you'll have to solve on your own with this recital. The big moments are tidal waves but the small ones are in the doldrums. The fillers are more of the same, although the opening of the Andante spianato is convincingly lyrical, if not exactly inward. The Grande Polonaise is surprisingly clipped, however, despite its bravura thrills. The great Polonaise-Fantasie lurches into view without a plan in mind for handling the shifting complexity to follow, but that's typical of Kempf, also, to live for the moment. The thrice-familiar Fantasie-Impromptu is dashed off willy-nilly.

I wonder if Liberace would have played tis way if he had Kempf's technique? I shudder to think. The piano sound, by the way, is loud and clangy.

INTRODUCTION: Chopin's four Ballades, if not deliberately composed as a cycle, make up the most perfect condensate of musical and pianistic refinement in the entire piano oeuvre. They also contain two of Chopin's utmost masterpieces--the passionately dramatic First Ballade in G minor and the ethereally elegiac Fourth Ballade in F minor. Given their vast scope, it's understandable that no one pianist probably will ever realise their accumulated greatness.

REFERENCES: Demidenko (Chopin: Ballades; Third Sonata); Ohlsson (Garrick Ohlsson - The Complete Chopin Piano Works Vol. 3 - Ballades)

I was indeed fairly and very impressed, respectively, by Freddy Kempf's first two Schumann and Rachmaninov recitals for BIS. His somewhat pretentious (and yet puerile) pianistic style rendered some thrilling Op 39 Etudes-Tableaux. However, transferred to Chopin's rather more intimately virtuosic Ballades, the results are willful to put it nicely--ephemerally empty to put it frankly.

Kempf seems to have set himself the objective of bringing some news to the music, not least in the speed department--and he is certainly trying hard. Well, if there is any music where news for the sake of it is anything but needed, Chopin's Ballades fit the bill. The First Ballade is so chopped up by erratic tempo shifts (just try the initial G minor section and you will find more tempos leading up to the E-flat major second section than in most other versions of the entire piece), accents and dynamics that its brilliant layout and melodic line become barely recognisable. The Second Ballade indeed gets a speedy rendition of the A minor sections (especially the Coda); compared with Kissin, who delivers at least as much drama, Kempf sounds squarely one-dimensional. The Third Ballade is at least well paced (I personally favour a rather more flowing speed than my references); otherwise, its jolly sonorities are too often turned into ill-integrated showcases. The Fourth Ballade remains at a superficially virtuosic level--miles away from the depth rendered by Demidenko and Ohlsson.

As to the fillers, the outwardly virtuosic Andante spianato and Grande Polonaise proves the disc's most successful piece in the hands of Kempf, in fact one of the most brilliant accounts in memory--alone more than worthy of the second star. The ubiquitous Fantaisie-Impromptu leaves a very short-lived and flashy impression. The late Op 61 masterpiece is simply too complex for Kempf's exaggerated and forced trying.

Even if Kempf's Chopin Ballades is a safe non-recommendation, I haven't given up on him. What distinguishes him from the likes of Li and Lang is that he has a refreshingly personal voice, if not yet fully developed. The recorded sound captured at Nybrokajen 11 in Stockholm is about as good as you are likely to get with a Yamaha instrument.

TIMINGS: Ballades--8:25, 6:37, 6:44, 9:31; Op 22--13:04; Op 61--11:17; Op 66--4:27

It is said the Russian audiences were outraged in the Tchaikovsky competition when Freddy Kempf came out third. One of my former teachers told me that the Russians often like to idolize their favorites among pianists, like teens idolize rock stars. But given the myriad numbers of contenders in both camps, one might hesitate to inquire further. Many critics have praised Freddy for his daring approach to the piano, while suggesting that what makes perfectly good sense for a newly minted player on the concert stage may frequently be less attractive in a CD recording that will get repeated hearings. My own view is that you should just appreciate Mr. Kempf for what he is, on this recording. That is, he is clearly a physically gifted young pianist who has grown up, loving the music he plays and has now chosen to record. His approach to the sheer sound worlds of the keyboard is large, big-hearted, and not afraid to take risks. Few among the young lions of the piano who are on current display seem to care more for the music, and less for their own special identities, than this Freddy does. When he plays, you hear Chopin. He has enough technique to bring off almost everything his musical imagination conceives, especially in these dramatic four Ballades, two polonaise, and the fantasy-impromptu. A grand sweep characterizes all. Nothing is timid. No salon music is going on in this CD. If you like Chopin as background music for daydreaming, or reading, or cram-studying for that next mid-term; this is not your man. You will probably abandon the daydream or the book or the cuneiform scribbles that fell all over the page while you tried to keep up with Professor xyz; instead you will likely be carried away, onto the wide and even cosmic vistas that Chopin could open up, all the while he was claiming to be just a displaced Polish patriot who lived in exile among the Parisian cognoscenti. Fasten your seatbelts, then, and do not exit until the Cd has come to a complete and full stop. Then you can be the judge of whether or not you want to play it, all over again. Recommended, man, and music.

Control, grace, precision, bravura, artistic freedom, are some of the words I would describe FK's interpretation of his repretiore he chooses to showcase. I find this CD with most of his other recordings to focus the orginal's composer's wishes rather highlighting the showmanship. It is refreshing to hear an instrumentalist's reservations of being indulgent.