Best Solo Piano Recordings for Relaxation & Focus - Classical & Contemporary Piano Music for Study, Meditation & Sleep

Product Description The thirty-five CDs that make up the present boxed set are designed to acquaint listeners with one of the most important pianists of the 20th century or, if they are already familiar with his work, to allow them to rediscover it anew. Wilhelm Kempff (1895-1991) was the final representative of the great tradition of German pianists that also included Artur Schnabel (1882-1951) and Wilhelm Backhaus (1884-1969). Of the three, Kempff had by far the longest career - he gave his last public concert in 1982. About the Artist Kempff was born in Jüterbog in Brandenburg in 1895. His father - also called Wilhelm - was organist and chorus master in the town's St Nicholas's Church, but in 1899 he was appointed to the post of Royal Director of Music and Kantor at St Nicholas's Church in Potsdam, where, as organist, he found it only natural to introduce his son to the instrument. His son's later work as an organist is documented here by excerpts from an emotionally charged concert that he gave in 1954 to inaugurate the Klais organ in the World Peace Memorial Cathedral in Hiroshima. Kempff's love of the organ may also help to explain why the works of Johann Sebastian Bach occupied such an important place in his repertory: after all, the Thomaskantor's music is not only every organist's bread and butter but also a source of untold pleasure. And it was entirely in the spirit of improvisatory organists that Kempff played the Aria from the Goldberg Variations in Hanover in 1969, performing the theme with a freedom that makes it already sound like the opening variation. Listeners familiar with the Goldberg Variations from the highly virtuosic perspective of a pianist like Glenn Gould (1955) or from the far more ascetic approach of performers interested in historical authenticity (Kempff himself always found harpsichord recitals "tedious") will enjoy Kempff's subtle, radiant and even opulent tone, to say nothing of his use of portato and legato. Kempff's father was very keen for his son to receive an all-round musical education, and a substantial part in this training was played by the court pianist Karl Heinrich Barth and by Robert Kahn, who taught composition in Berlin. The young Kempff was ten when he started lessons with them. By the 1920s he was already so successful as a composer that Wilhelm Furtwängler took it upon himself to give the first performance of his Second Symphony. His extensive work-list includes contributions to every existing genre. But it was his Bach transcriptions that have proved the most enduring. The chorale preludes are particularly affecting by dint of their unpretentious simplicity. Kempff was a master of the art of creating organ-like registrations on the piano, bringing out the principal voices, ensuring that the secondary voices were never over-prominent and modulating the sound of the piano in as varied a manner as possible. That he was also a master of counterpoint may be judged from the Preludes and Fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier that he recorded in 1975 and 1980. The three great B's - Bach, Beethoven and Brahms - formed the cornerstones of Kempff's repertory. He took a particular interest in Beethoven's piano sonatas, which he often performed as a cycle and which he recorded three times between 1926 and 1965, later also taking them as the starting point for his summer schools in Positano. In 2008, in a profile of Kempff, the German writer on music Ingo Harden pointed out that although there are differences between the pianist's recordings of these sonatas, "all three reveal his characteristically un-Titanic approach". In particular the stereo version that is included in the present set of releases privileges a profoundly lyrical Beethoven. Thanks to his delight in pointing up the underlying spirit of these works, Kempff creates the impression that he is reinventing the music at the moment of interpretation, and yet the articulation and phrasing are so clearly thought through that the listener can sense the lengthy engagement with these sonatas that lies behind the apparent spontaneity. In Beethoven as elsewhere, Kempff makes no attempt to break any speed records, but still keeps the music moving. In the 1930s Artur Schnabel forced expression and tempi in both directions, but Kempff tended, rather, to seek a sense of classical balance. "The pathos seemed more refined, more profound, more spiritualized," the music critic Karl Schumann once summed up Kempff's approach to Beethoven. Another characteristic of Kempff's style that emerges from these late Beethoven recordings is his particular tone, which was often described as "light" and full of "Mediterranean brightness". If anyone ever expressed doubts in Kempff's credentials as an interpreter of Beethoven's music, he would point out that his teacher of many years' standing, Karl Heinrich Barth, had himself been a pupil of Bülow and Tausig, who in turn had been taught by Liszt, and that Liszt had been taught by Czerny, who had had lessons with Beethoven himself. In the case of Brahms, this pedigree was shorter in that Robert Kahn had actually been friendly with the composer. Kempff's Brahms, too, is very personal: his performances of the piano works were invariably marked by a seductive tonal beauty and great naturalness. And even when Kempff ratchets up the dynamics and intensity, as he does, for example, in the Ballades and the Sonata op. 5, and even when the sheer sound grows in volume, his fortissimo playing never bludgeons the listener. Kempff himself always insisted that the piano should not be mishandled as a percussion instrument - with him, one listens in vain for the harsh and metallic sound of the grand pianos used in many later recordings. Alfred Brendel once said that for Kempff, "cantabile" was "the essence of music, an idea that has largely become lost. Kempff refused to unduly interfere with the music. He was the very best kind of virtuoso." This characterization also applies to Kempff's Schumann. There are undoubtedly faster and more urgent interpretations of the Études symphoniques and the Fantasie, but Kempff's ability to bring out the different voices, to create moods and to build overarching paragraphs is in a league entirely of its own. Kempff's "formative virtuosity" was such that technical mastery was always in the service of the musical message. It was above all Schumann's early works that Kempff valued, whereas with Schubert it was the later works. Werner Grünzweig, who co-edited a remarkable documentary study of Kempff, once observed that the pianist "brought to an initial conclusion one of the great projects in 20th-century piano playing, namely the revival of Schubert's sonatas, an aim he achieved in the 1960s by means of a magnificent recording of all the sonatas, including those that have survived in only fragmentary form". Kempff himself described Schubert's music as "an eternal wellspring that flows entirely naturally". And it was very much this characteristic that he found so congenial in Schubert's sonatas, for his aim in making music was never simply to go into details but always to see the bigger picture. Kempff's particular tone quality - transparent, delicate to the point of fragility, and pithily powerful in forte passages - invests his Schubert, too, with a very real nobility, as is clear from his reading of the Impromptus and the Moments musicaux: here, as elsewhere, Kempff makes only sparing but purposeful use of the sustaining pedal, never inflating the tone, but ensuring that everything always sounds clear and perfectly structured. Wilhelm Kempff's recording career began in 1920, and he made multiple recordings of many works. The aim in compiling the present releases was to concentrate on the later recordings and to use earlier ones to fill in a handful of gaps in the repertory. Lesser-known recordings are now made available again within the context of this collection - this is true, for example, of the Chopin performances that Kempff recorded in London in 1958, when he was briefly under contract to Decca. His interpretations of the Second and Third Sonatas are particularly worth hearing, not least for the way in which Kempff brings to them an expressivity almost untypical of his style. Of course, there are livelier interpretations of Chopin's fast movements, but whenever Kempff reveals his mastery of the cantilena, notably in the Impromptus and Ballades and in the Berceuse and the Barcarolle, one senses his spiritual affinity with the composer: his Chopin radiates such subtle nuances and such brilliance, so much elegant fluency and - in the Polonaises and the Fantasy - so much seriousness and dignity that these recordings can hold their own in any company. Kempff's Liszt interpretations convey a similar picture, and it is hard to imagine any other artist painting the Italian scenes from the Années de pèlerinage with such beauty of tone or such atmospheric density. These recordings can stand up to scrutiny by dint of the intimate moments in Sposalizio, the consummately natural singing tone of the Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa and the pianist's incomparably bright tone in the Sonetti di Petrarca. Like Liszt, Mozart is represented here by only a single CD, the high points of which are the two minor-key Fantasies K. 397 and K. 475. In terms of their articulation and dynamics, Kempff brings to them an intensity that transforms them into something akin to a dramatic operatic recitative. "There was scarcely any other pianist in the 20th century", wrote Ingo Harden, "who had as distinctive a musical profile as Wilhelm Kempff." Anyone who has listened to these thirty-five CDs will emphatically confirm this assessment.