Music |
William Kapell
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Classical
William Kapell
Videos
Kapell plays Scarlatti
William Kapell is the greatest American pianist you’ve never heard of.
Born in New York in 1922, he was, at 18, performing with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
On a lark, he visited a psychic. “You’ll have a meteoric career,” she told him, “and you’ll be dead before you’re 30.”
And by 20, he was a star, celebrated for his virtuosity, his intensity and, not least, his movie-star good looks.
In 1953, he embarked on a grueling — 37 concerts in fourteen weeks — tour of Australia. He loved the music, hated the critics. “How I wait for that plane home you have no idea,” he wrote in a letter.
The psychic was almost flawless. Flying into San Francisco, the wing of that plane clipped a mountain. Everyone died. William Kapell was 31.
Seven years later, most of Kapell’s recordings were out of print. Some made it back, and a small cult kept the flame alive. Happily, a music lover in Australia had recorded the radio concerts of Kapell’s final tour, and he’d passed those recordings on, and — fifty years to the day after Kapell’s death — the news of their existence reached Kapell’s grandson.
And now we have the appropriately titled Kapell reDISCOVERED.
Thos two-CD set requires a consumer warning: It’s a time trip. There are hisses. There are pops. This is not the quality of recording you are used to.
Those technical flaws continue throughout, and yet they quickly become unimportant. William Kapell sucks you in — that’s what happens when an artist lives for his art.
Kapell was, I’ve read, a man of great passions. His pet hates were war, ugliness and the business side of culture. His loves were his family and music. And music was probably first because it started first.
Virgil Thomson once said that Kapell “was afraid of nobody because his heart was pure.” Apparently. Just as Michael Jordan used to lift weights even on game days, so — even on recital days — Kapell might practice for as much as eight hours. What was he looking for? Beyond technique, he was working to play his pieces as their composers had intended — he was searching for literal meaning, not his own interpretation.
Purists rave about his recordings of Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto. He was a supreme performer of Mendelssohn and Prokofiev. His Chopin and Mozart are both confident and delicate.
On “Kapell reDISCOVERED”, you don’t get the Khachaturian. You do get Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, suites by Bach and Debussy, sonatas by Mozart and Prokofiev, three Chopin pieces — and Mussorgsky’s “Pictures At An Exhibition.”
The Mussorgsky is often considered a corny piece, a crowd-pleaser for audiences that don’t much like serious music. But I’ve been listening to it over and over, and each time, it’s as if I’ve never heard it before. Kapell’s concentration is so intense that I concentrate with him — when he reaches “The Great Gate of Kiev”, I can almost see that massive door slowly opening.
“Those of us with something urgent to say,” Kapell wrote, “we give everything.”
And he did.
To buy “Kapell reDISCOVERED” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy Kapell playing Rachmaninoff from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy Kapell playing Chopin, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Mozart from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy Kapell playing “Pictures At An Exhibition”, Bach, Debussy, Liszt and Mozart from Amazon.com, click here.
To visit the web site for William Kapell, click here.
