I
can’t see how Kempff’s memory is best served by issuing this
catastrophic - in all senses – live performance of the E
flat major Concerto. Recorded on tour in Caracas the sound
is bewilderingly awful – muffled percussion and lower strings,
synthetic sounding hum and noise, the weirdest examples of
tuttis I think I’ve ever heard - as if the sound were suddenly
sucked out mechanically - and spatial wandering between left
and right channels. Allied to this is the orchestra, a reasonable
but hardly impressive one – weak winds, lack of string weight.
And on top of this is Kempff; I’m quite prepared to believe
it was Kempff that night in March 1956 but if so he was on
calamitous form. He begins with audibly flustered slips from
5’00 onwards – but this seems to have set him off for the
rest of the performance. It recovers in the second movement
to an extent but comes horribly adrift in the finale. By
the end Kempff has given up completely and he pounds away
manically during the final orchestral tutti – utter calamity.
The
rest of the programme derives from a programme given two
days earlier. The G major Concerto is not the car crash its
companion was but those who have the two commercial LP traversals
of the Beethoven concertos (van Kempen and Leitner) will
find no inducement to add this sub-par performance to their
racks. Indicative of the problem is the rather uninflected
and quick run-through of the slow movement and the lack of
interplay between soloist and orchestral principals. The
Mozart concerto fares better; the orchestral sound is still
distant but the playing is neat enough and Kempff is elegant
and warm. There are some rapturously received encores – indeed
the Emperor was rapturously received as well.
The
notes are superficial and tell us nothing about the circumstances
of the tour or its attendant problems, still less about conductor
Rios Reyna.
Pass
by.
Jonathan Woolf
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Wilhelm
Kempff (piano) 
