Freddy kempf beethoven biography

Spectacular music with a superb supporting quintet.

Kempf has continued to perform solo, chamber and concertante music in Europe, the Americas, East Asia and Australia, and has recorded recital discs of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff and Schumann.

Beethoven would have loved hearing pianist Freddie Kempf last night play his Piano Concerto No 5, a work the beleaguered genius struggled to bring to the stage and only saw performed once. By the time the fifth reached its premier he was stone deaf and incapable of taking to the stage. What seems easy in his style is nonetheless alert and accurate, pitched in a demanding band between relaxation and tension, a balance at the core of all music.

He manages to invigorate the audience during the bright sections of complex, fast fingerwork but strangely lull us into a hypnotic daze in the celebrated slow movements. He has been winning prizes since he was eight years old — and when he came third at the Moscow Tchaichovsky piano competition, there was practically an international outcry led by an outraged Russian Press who claimed he was the hero of the show they take their music pretty seriously over there.

Since then he has expanded from his North London beginnings to charm the world with a style of playing that is lyrical, beautiful, urgent and somehow wonderfully youthful. The performance Sunday, full of excitement and romantic nuance with a well chosen cast of players, was part of The Cambridge Summer Music Festival , rapidly turning out to be a dazzling sequence of supremely talented stars.

It continues through 29 July.

Freddy Kempf plays the last movement (Rondo Allegro) of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.4 Op with the Bristol Ensemble conducted by Jonathan James.

I seldom close my eyes in concerts -- it looks a bit strange and affected -- I used to think. But last night I was more or less put under by the relaxed mastery in the playing, and drifted into a sound world of suppressed and sublime calm. Beethoven had his eye on all that tranquility though. The third movement of the Concerto no.

The Wiener Kammersymphonie is a hard working and wonderful-looking accompanying ensemble. They drifted on to the stage dramatically, three women in three gorgeous floor length gowns in red, purple and green silk, all brilliant violinists -- the base and cello sustained with heroic vigour by two men. They substituted, just the five of them, for an entire orchestra.

These musical works are normally performed when the piano is backed up by the full works, serried ranks of musicians all sawing away — in this version the percussion woodwind and brass vanished entirely.