Modest Mussorgsky: Pictures from an Exhibition

Maurice Ravel: Gaspard de la Nuit

Mily Balakirev: Islamey – Oriental Fantasy

 

Freddy Kempf - piano

 

Two years since his last release on BIS, Freddy Kempf returns to present a programme featuring three central works in the great virtuoso repertoire for solo piano. Each piece has the qualities in terms of characterisation and timbre that have resulted in well-known orchestral arrangements. Pictures from an Exhibition was composed following the death of Mussorgsky’s friend, the painter and architect Viktor Hartmann. Balakirev’s Islamey was composed five years earlier and 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.

 

Partly on the basis of his several discs on BIS, 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.

 

BIS SACD BISSACD1580