Wilhelm Kempff (piano)
Deutsche Grammophon · 4765318 · 2 hours 29 minutes
Schubert’s piano music lives in a strange emotional territory — it can feel almost too intimate, like reading someone’s diary, and Kempff understood that instinctively. His touch here is so unhurried and unforced that the famous Wanderer Fantasy and the late sonatas breathe like conversation rather than performance. There’s a plainness to how he approaches ornament and phrase that somehow makes the music feel more devastating, not less.
Awards:
- Penguin Guide — Rosette
Wilhelm Kempff (piano)
Deutsche Grammophon · E4530102 · 2 hours 11 minutes
Beethoven’s late sonatas exist in a world of their own — music written by a deaf composer essentially talking to himself, stripped of any need to please an audience, and the results are some of the strangest, most visionary piano writing ever committed to paper. Kempff’s approach here is almost the opposite of monumental: he finds a singing lightness in these pieces that makes the Hammerklavier‘s fugue feel like thought in motion rather than a structural exercise. There’s a vulnerability to his touch that suits the introspective quality of the final three sonatas especially, where Beethoven seems less interested in drama than in something harder to name.
Awards:
- Penguin Guide — Rosette
Wilhelm Kempff (piano)Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Paul van Kempen
Deutsche Grammophon · 4765299 · 3 hours 9 minutes
Kempff’s way with Beethoven sits in a fascinating middle ground — there’s real Classical-era poise in his playing, a kind of restraint that makes the emotional eruptions feel genuinely earned rather than manufactured. These mono recordings from the early 1950s capture something almost conversational between him and van Kempen, as if the two are working out the drama of each concerto in real time. The slow movements in particular have this quiet inevitability to them that more overtly “big” interpretations rarely manage.
Awards:
- Penguin Guide — Rosette
Wilhelm Kempff (piano)
Deutsche Grammophon · 4479662 · 9 hours 37 minutes
Beethoven’s 32 sonatas are essentially a composer’s entire inner life laid out across the keyboard, and Kempff understood that better than almost anyone who’s ever sat down at the instrument. There’s a singing quality to his touch that makes even the stormier sonatas feel like they’re breathing, never bulldozed into submission. The complete cycle clocks in at nearly ten hours, and somehow it never once feels like an endurance test — that’s just how naturally he inhabits this music.
Awards:
- Penguin Guide — Rosette
“Wilhelm Kempff was the most inspirational of Beethoven pianists. Those who have cherished his earlier stereo cycle for its magical spontaneity will find Kempff’s qualities even more intensely…”
— Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010
Sviatoslav Richter (piano), Henryk Szeryng (violin), Ida Haendel (violin), Wilhelm Kempff (piano), Mstislav Rostropovich (cello), Emil Gilels (piano), Karel Ančerl
Supraphon · SU43492 · 7 hours 57 minutes
There’s something almost overwhelming about hearing Ančerl draw out the best in this particular constellation of soloists — Richter, Szeryng, Haendel, Kempff, Rostropovich, Gilels, all caught live at the Czech Radio in performances that crackle with the kind of spontaneity no studio session can manufacture. Nearly eight hours of concerto repertoire sounds like a lot, but when the playing is this committed and the conductor this attuned to each soloist’s personality, it flies by. These are documents of a golden age of collaboration, and Supraphon has done right by them.
Krystian Zimerman (piano), Shura Cherkassky, John Ogdon & Brenda Lucas (piano), Vinson Cole (tenor), Roberto Szidon (piano), Lazar Berman (piano), Alice Sara Ott (piano), Jorge Bolet (piano), Wilhelm Kempff (piano), Nikita Magaloff (piano)Boston Symphony Orchestra, Berliner Philharmoniker,…
Deutsche Grammophon · 4779525 · 34 hours 12 minutes
Liszt spent his whole career daring pianists to find the soul inside the spectacle, and this sprawling collection proves just how many ways there are to answer that challenge. Zimerman brings aristocratic precision, Berman unleashes a kind of volcanic grandeur, Bolet finds a late-Romantic warmth that feels almost confessional — and that’s before you’ve even scratched the surface of 34 hours of music. It’s the kind of set where you keep stumbling onto a performance that reframes everything you thought you knew about a piece.
Awards:
- Presto Recording of the Week — 24th October 2011
- Building a Library — April 2013 — First Choice
Berliner Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan, Géza Anda (piano), Glenn Gould (piano), Gundula Janowitz, Christa Ludwig, Jess Thomas, Walter Berry, Irmgard Seefried, Wolfgang Schneiderhan, Jörg Demus (piano), Wilhelm Kempff (piano), Christoph Eschenbach (piano)
Berliner Philharmoniker · BPHR 240291
There’s something electric about catching Karajan in the live arena rather than the polished studio environment he’s so often associated with — the risks he took, the moments where the Berliner Philharmoniker lean into something slightly dangerous, feel genuinely alive in ways his famous DG sessions sometimes smooth over. Across 24 discs you get an extraordinary cast of collaborators: Glenn Gould bringing his idiosyncratic genius to whatever he touches, Wilhelm Kempff’s warm Beethoven sensibility, Gundula Janowitz floating lines that seem to defy gravity. The imperfections here aren’t flaws to apologize for — they’re evidence that something real was happening on those Berlin nights.
“The pleasure of this 24-disc hybrid CD/SACD set, from sampled listening, is the chance to hear risk, imperfection and the adventure of live recording. Repertoire includes the expected European…”
— The Guardian, 22nd February 2025,5 out of 5 stars
