Music & Arts

Why isn't she better known? As a child, she studied with her mother, and then in Havana's Peyrellade Conservatory. At 17, she enrolled at the National Conservatory of Music in Paris where she continued to excel. It was in Paris that she met her husband, an accomplished flutist and a chemistry student. Zayas won an international piano competition in Geneva, got married, had three sons, and eventually ended up in America where she studied with David Bar-Illan, among others. Her New York City debut took place in 1977 in Alice Tully Hall. New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg, a man who knows his pianists, was ecstatic, and in a year-end retrospective he mentioned only two of them as having given noteworthy recitals: Bolet and Zayas.

What is her playing like? She is a strong pianist, and her Chopin is characterized by big gestures, although never to the point of exaggeration. The forward movement of the music is emphasized, even in a more restful piece such as the Andante spianato, which also displays her beautifully singing tone. Her tempos tend to be fast, not rushed, and her use of the pedal is sensitive. In short, she has no Achilles's heel as far as technique is concerned, and her interpretations are passionate, yet not ruled by passion. On this disc, she and the Steinway she plays have been given excellent sound by engineers Tom Lazarus and Virginia Read of Classic Sound.

In short, even if you have other recordings of Chopin's Preludes, you need to make room for this one. Juana Zayas is phenomenal.

The first of these two CDs contains the concertos. The Mozart comes from the collection of Deutsche Rundfunkarchiv, and is a broadcast performance from April 3, 1939. A German announcer gets things off to a jarring start (jarring, at least, if you were expecting Mozart's gracious C-major opening instead!), but he soon gets out of the way and allows Kempff to make his quiet magic. The Leipzig orchestra is functional rather than distinguished, but Kempff sounds at peace with the music, and as a result, so are we. The "Emperor" was recorded in 1936 for Deutsche Grammophon. This too is a "live" performance, as the applause at the end indicates. This is an "Emperor" with punch, although it is the Berlin Philharmonic that strikes the more aggressive note. Kempff is most distinctive when he is most intimate; he was a master of the mezzo piano and all the dynamic gradations that surrounded it.

The second CD contains broadcast recordings from the Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Hamburg. Eight of the selections were recorded on August 18, 1945 and the other five of the selections are from October 10 of that same year. The sound is unexpectedly fine on this second disc. ("Technical reconstruction" for this set was done by Maggi Payne.) As with the first disc, the repertoire is no surprise; Bach, Chopin, and Liszt remained an important part of Kempff's repertoire for decades. The Fauré Nocturne is more unusual. Kempff plays it memorably well, with sentiment but no bathos, and with a finger pointed towards Liszt. If German pianists have a reputation for being cold fish, this reputation is belied by playing such as this.

Given their broadcast origins, these recordings do not offer note-perfect performances - how could they? They do preserve some of Kempff's earlier work (although he was already 50 in 1945), and they prove that he didn't need the isolation and concentration of the recording studio to make himself one with the music that he was playing. Dedication and class without egotism - that was Wilhelm Kempff. Thanks to Music & Arts for bringing us rare recordings that really did deserve to be brought to light.

Brittens Music Eastbourne