Freddy Kempf - Mussorgsky · Ravel · Balakirev '2008

Tracks list

Tracklist

01. Pictures at an Exhibition: Promenade
02. Pictures at an Exhibition: I. Gnomus
03. Pictures at an Exhibition: Promenade
04. Pictures at an Exhibition: II. The Old Castle
05. Pictures at an Exhibition: Promenade
06. Pictures at an Exhibition: III. Tuileries
07. Pictures at an Exhibition: IV. Bydlo
08. Pictures at an Exhibition: Promenade
09. Pictures at an Exhibition: V. Ballet of the Chickens in their Shells
10. Pictures at an Exhibition: VI. Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle (Two Polish
Jews-Rich and Poor)
11. Pictures at an Exhibition: Promenade
12. Pictures at an Exhibition: VII. Limoges, the Market
13. Pictures at an Exhibition: VIII. Catacombae: Sepulchrum romanum
14. Pictures at an Exhibition: Cum mortuis in lingua mortua
15. Pictures at an Exhibition: IX. The Hut on Fowls Legs (Baba Yaga)
16. Pictures at an Exhibition: X. The Great Gate of Kiev
17. Gaspard de la nuit, M. 55: I. Ondine
18. Gaspard de la nuit, M. 55: II. Le gibet
19. Gaspard de la nuit, M. 55: III. Scarbo
20. Islamey


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 Chopins 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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