Freddy Kempf

Freddy Kempf – Chopin: Etudes Op.10 & 25 (2004) MCH SACD ISO

SACD / DSD By admin · March 22, 2024 · Comments off

Freddy Kempf’s Chopin Etudes largely eschew the willful mannerisms that pockmarked his accounts of the same composer’s Ballades. Yet some of his rubatos still seem artificial and arch, as in the E-flat Op. 10 No. 11 and Op. 25 Nos. 1 and 3. Knowing Kempf’s fabulous technique first-hand from hearing him in person, I’m surprised that his “Black Key” Etude lacks sparkle and lightness, or how cautiously he treads through the difficult thickets of Op. 25 Nos. 4 and 6. Works that traverse the keyboard in sweeping arcs, however, bring out the best in Kempf. These include Op. 10 No. 1, where the chorale-like bass notes proudly ring out against the taxing right-hand arpeggios, a mighty “Winter Wind” Op. 25 No. 11, and one of the most blazing accounts of the celebrated “Revolutionary” Etude on disc (Op. 10 No. 12). Still, Ashkenazy, Pollini, Perahia, and Juana Zayas (my favorite among modern Chopin Etudes recordings) outdistance Kempf in the realms of varied sonority and musical insight. BIS’ ugly, glassy sound dips below the label’s usual high standard of piano engineering.

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Freddy Kempf – Liszt. 12 Etudes dexecution transcendante (2001) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · May 28, 2023 · Comments off

Award-winning British pianist Freddy Kempf had already made a name for himself performing these Liszt Études live before releasing this recording in 2002, all while still in his early 20s.

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Freddy Kempf, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Andrew Litton – Prokofiev: Piano Concertos (2010) MCH SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

SACD / DSD By admin · February 6, 2023 · Comments off

Whatever one might call it – virtuosity, charisma, panache, or just plain guts – pianist Freddy Kempf certainly has it. Kempf has successfully deployed his gifts in some of the most difficult works in the piano repertoire in a consistently impressive series of discs for BIS. He’s taken on Bach partitas, Beethoven sonatas, Chopin etudes, and Rachmaninov preludes, and he’s brought them to dizzying heights where the air is thin and only the greatest pianists can breathe. But while there’s no doubt Kempf is bringing his best qualities to bear on this disc of Prokofiev’s Second and Third piano concertos and his Second Piano Sonata, it is nowhere nearly as successful as his earlier recordings. Perhaps this is because, for all his blazing virtuosity, Kempf tends to lean toward the light and lyrical in Prokofiev, and this approach doesn’t always fit with the music. It works brilliantly in the body of the Third Concerto’s opening Allegro and in much of the same work’s closing Allegro ma non troppo, where Kempf’s fleet fingers and racing tempos carry all before them. But in the Third’s central theme and variations, and in most of the Second’s opening Allegretto and closing Allegro tempestoso, Kempf sounds oddly underpowered, as if he lacked the strength to convey the steel and iron of the music. That surely cannot be the case for a pianist who has turned in a performance of “The Great Gate of Kiev” from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition that could, if aimed in the right direction, reduce Gibraltar to pebbles. Whatever the cause, this disc is somewhat disappointing, coming from such a gifted player. Andrew Litton and the Bergen Philharmonic are more than adequate, but not much more, as accompanists. BIS’ super audio sound seems to surround and even envelop the listener.

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Freddy Kempf – Prokofiev: Piano Sonatas Nos. 3, 8 & 9 (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · February 6, 2023 · Comments off

Sergei Prokofiev virtually grew up at the keyboard –he composed for the piano from early childhood, and the instrument was his workshop and laboratory. Well before the end of his student days he had absorbed the virtuoso techniques of Rachmaninov and Scriabin, and to these he added his own brilliant, sharp-edged virtuosity, marked by a keen contrast between dramatic, hard-driven passages and more intimate and gentle lyrical moments. His nine sonatas therefore hold a very special place in his output and represent his language at its most personal, free of any external dramatic, verbal or visual associations: they contain the essential Prokofiev.

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Freddy Kempf – MUSSORGSKY, M.P.: Pictures at an Exhibition / RAVEL, M.: Gaspard de la nuit / BALAKIREV, M.A.: Islamey (Kempf) (2008) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · February 6, 2023 · Comments off

Freddy Kempf – MUSSORGSKY, M.P.: Pictures at an Exhibition / RAVEL, M.: Gaspard de la nuit / BALAKIREV, M.A.: Islamey (Kempf) (2008)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:05:16 minutes | 925 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

Partly on the basis of his several discs on BIS, Freddy Kempf enjoys a reputation as an explosive and physical performer but also as a highly sensitive artist. His performance of Chopin’s Etudes received high praise, for instance in American Record Guide: ‘At 27, Kempf has attained something most pianists strive for over an entire lifetime … This release can justly take its place among the very finest recordings of Chopin’s Etudes. The set of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes was equally well received: ‘Kempf captures the essence of Liszt in playing of wistful nostalgia, yearning passion, with arpeggios and cadenzas that shimmer and scintillate’ (International Piano). The programme on the present release bears witness to Liszt’s contribution to piano writing: three central works in the great virtuoso literature for solo piano with qualities in terms of characterisation and timbre that have led them all to become the objects of orchestral arrangements – in the case of Mussorgsky’s Pictures numerous times. Pictures from an Exhibition was composed in only three weeks in 1874, in a sort of creative frenzy following the death of Mussorgsky’s friend, the painter and architect Viktor Hartmann. Some of the pictures by Hartmann that inspired Mussorgsky have now disappeared; those that have survived can be seen at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. But to search for a direct correspondence between the pictures and their musical counterparts would be pointless: Mussorgsky sought to portray Hartmann’s world more intuitively. Balakirev’s Islamey was composed five years earlier, and is based on two themes. The first, called ‘Islamey’, is a melody from north Caucasia, and the second is a Tatar melody from the Crimea. It was long regarded as the most difficult work in the entire piano repertory, and in fact, when Ravel 1908 composed Scarbo, the third movement of Gaspard de la Nuit, he specifically wanted to write something that would be even more difficult. Based, like the other two movements, on a prose poem by the French fantastic writer Aloysius Bertrand, Scarbo is the depiction of an evil spirit of the night, while Ondine describes the futile love of a water nymph for the poet, and Le Gibet a hanged man and his gallows.

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Freddy Kempf – Beethoven. Sonatas: Pathetique, Moonlight and Appassionata (2004) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 25, 2022 · Comments off

Freddy Kempf - Beethoven. Sonatas: Pathetique, Moonlight and Appassionata (2004) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz] Download

The first disc we released with Freddy Kempf playing Beethoven (BIS-CD-1120) was welcomed with great acclaim all over the world. English reviewers called his interpretations “fresh, vibrant readings presented in a fluent eagerly communicative style‚ (Gramophone) and judged that “Kempf’s insight into the character of each of these Olympian masterpieces is astonishing and is allied to formidable virtuosity and musicianship” (Sunday Telegraph). Of course the great thing about Beethoven, as with all great music, is that there are no definitive performances. A performance by a musician with the skills, charisma and musical insights of a Freddy Kempf naturally awakens our appetites. Not because they will, perhaps, tell us more about Beethoven or more about Freddy Kempf, but because, if we are lucky, they will communicate insights into life itself; insights that words cannot convey, that paintings cannot depict, that moving images cannot even approach. Music, in the best instance, communicates at a level that other arts cannot reach. So the best compositions, interpreted by contemporary musicians of the highest calibre, are naturally a mouth-watering prospect. Like this new disc!
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