Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26

Freddy Kempf’s 2003 Prokofiev solo recital was described as ‘a superb disc’ in Gramophone, whose critic went on to write: ‘Kempf is joyfully exuberant, flashing through every savage challenge with the assurance and instinct of a born virtuoso.’

Kempf, Litton and the Bergen PO now join forces in an all-Prokofiev programme that includes the most popular of his five piano concertos, namely the Third, a spontaneous work, vigorous and melodic in turns and full of striking material presented in a typical Prokofiev manner. This is coupled with the Second Piano Concerto, which Prokofiev himself premièred in 1913, shocking the audience with its modernistic sounds and jagged rhythms.

More than a half-century has passed since the American pianist William Kapell (1922- 1953) died after an all too brief career, in a freak plane crash on California's King's Mountain, only a few minutes before he was to touch down in San Francisco. His memory is still cherished and interest in his artistry was recently revived by the release of a number of amateur off-the-air recordings of performances from his Australian tour. By popular demand Music & Arts is re-issuing this 1997 album, of which Tim Page, Kapell's biographer, wrote: "[The Prokofiev Third] is probably the finest performance of the concerto that Kapell left us and it is much preferable, in its spontaneity and poetic fury, to the curiously tame RCA Victor recording he had made a month earlier with Antal Dorati and the Dallas Symphony... The Brahms concerto is the last major work with orchestra that Kapell played in New York, slightly more than six months before he died. Here again, we have the Philharmonic (this time under Dmitri Mitropoulos on April 12, 1953) recorded in the luscious acoustics of the old Carnegie Hall. While there is still a good deal of brilliance in the playing - listen to the ferocity with which Kapell attacks passages of exposed octaves - there is also a welcome poise and serenity in softer passages and an abiding sense of formal structure throughout."