Wilhelm Kempff News
German pianist and composer
Commemorations 2025 (Birth: Wilhelm Kempff)
- piano, organ
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- composer, pianist, musicologist, university teacher, autobiographer
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2024-04-24
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2023-12-18 15:57:45
Three Pianists, December 2023
[…] Impromptus D. 899 and D.935. Lupu probably didn’t need any competition wins for his tremendous talent to be noticed by the public and the critics. Mitsuko Uchida didn’t need them either: all she got from competing in the majors was second place in the 1975 Leeds (a solid Dmitry Alekseyev won, and Schiff shared the third prize). Uchida’s family moved to Vienna when she was 12. She studied there at the Academy of Music (Wilhelm Kempff was one of her teachers). In the 1980s Uchida moved to London and has lived there since. In 2009, she was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the second-highest British award. Uchida is rightfully famous for her Mozart, but her repertoire is very broad, from Haydn to Schoenberg. Here’s Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 12 in F major, K.332, and here – one of the 12 Etudes by Debussy, no. 3, […]
2022-07-23 00:24:04
The French-born, Italian-based pianist Muriel Chemin follows up her 2017 Beethoven Diabelli Variations release with nothing less than a complete cycle of the composer’s 32 piano sonatas. Chemin’s serious-minded interpretations fall somewhere between Wilhelm Kempff’s intimately scaled conceptions and the rhetorical style of Claudio Arrau. Tempos tend toward moderation (which partially explains the cycle’s 10-disc […]
2022-05-30 16:56:29
Kempff’s Bach playing and Bach transcriptions add up to a curious fusion of modern-day textual honesty and old-school octave doublings, filled out chords, and outsized climaxes. The pianist’s luminous, line-oriented Brahms fares better in his Decca recordings than in his less yielding, slightly stiffer DG stereo remakes. While there’s little significant interpretive difference between Kempff’s […]
2022-03-19 18:38:44
Robert Schumann composed his Arabesque in C major, Op. 18 in 1839 when he was 29 years old. Schumann dedicated it to Frau Majorin Friederike Serre auf Maxen, to whom he also dedicated his Blumenstück in D-flat, Op. 19. In the autumn of 1838 Schumann had left Leipzig for Vienna. His relationship with Clara Wieck had reached a point of no return, as her father opposed anything that might interfere with his daughter’s career as a pianist and strongly disapproved of Schumann as a possible son-in-law. Geographically yet not emotionally detached from Clara, Schumann was able to communicate with Clara
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