Found: Treasure of William Kapell, a pianist who died young
Culture - Published: June 9, 2008
William Kapell, who died at 31 in 1953, one of the most gifted pianists of his generation.
In August 1953 the astonishing young American pianist William Kapell traveled to Australia for an extended tour. Over 14 weeks he played 37 concerts, both solo recitals and concertos. On his return trip to New York, where his wife of five years and their young son and daughter were awaiting him, the DC-6 Kapell was flying in clipped a forested mountain 35 miles south of San Francisco, plunged into a ridge and fell apart in flames. All 19 people aboard died. Kapell was 31.
During a professional career of barely 12 years Kapell emerged as the most prodigiously gifted and exciting American pianist of his generation. In his artistry it was impossible to separate awesome technique from fierce integrity and deep insight. Every note mattered in a Kapell performance. His pianism uncannily balanced contrasting qualities. It was impetuous yet sensitive, white hot yet poetic, cogent yet instinctive, assured yet intense. And on the concert stage his brooding good looks added to the allure.
“His playing had that indefinable thing known as command,” the critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote in his book “The Great Pianists” (1963), adding that before his death Kapell was “well on his way to being one of the century’s important pianists.” For years Kapell’s reputation has been sustained by the limited number of commercial recordings he made for RCA and scattered recordings taken from live performances that circulated for decades as pirated collector’s items. In 1998 BMG Classics released a nine-CD “William Kapell Edition,” bringing together all those RCA recordings and others previously unreleased, including an entire live recital at the Frick Collection recorded in 1953, just months before that Australian tour.
For me the revelation of the collection was a performance of Copland’s Piano Sonata from the Frick recital, a keenly intelligent yet playful account of this still-neglected work from 1941. Kapell’s playing of the wistfully jazzy second movement is especially wondrous. Copland, who had promised to write Kapell a major work, dedicated his 30-minute Piano Fantasy to Kapell’s memory.
The “William Kapell Edition” also offered fragments, alternate takes and a private home recording: 81 pieces in all, 66 of them new to CD. For admirers of Kapell’s artistry, this comprehensive set, though still limited, seemed the best one could hope for.
Then, in 2004, came news that during the Australian tour in 1953 a Melbourne department store salesman and lover of classical music, Roy Preston, had made recordings of several Kapell performances. Preston, a loner, obsessively recorded concerts transmitted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on a home machine that cut grooves with a needle on acetate discs. On his death in 2003, at 88, he bequeathed his collection - more than 10,000 LPs, CDs, 78s and acetate discs - to a much younger friend, Maurice Austin, also a music enthusiast.
Austin started searching for the Kapell family and eventually got an e-mail message through to the pianist’s grandson, Joshua Kapell, who received the note on Oct. 29, 2003, 50 years to the day after William Kapell’s death.
Joshua Kapell immediately notified his grandmother, William Kapell’s widow, Anna Lou Dehavenon, an anthropologist who lives in New York, who was elated and overcome by the news of these recordings. After receiving CD copies of the acetate discs and distributing them among her children and grandchildren to make sure they merited release, she signed on to the project.
Jon Samuels, the engineer who produced the 1998 set, took charge of the effort to restore the recordings from the 1953 tour, and Eliot Leigh, one of Kapell’s grandchildren, was the assistant engineer. Now Sony BMG Masterworks has released a two-disc album, “Kapell Rediscovered: The Australian Broadcasts.” Containing 150 minutes of music, it adds immeasurably to the Kapell legacy.
Naturally, the works new to the Kapell discography will generate the most excitement. These include the first complete recordings we have of him performing Debussy’s “Suite Bergamasque,” a refreshingly articulate and unsentimental account, and Prokofiev’s daunting Seventh Sonata, played with breathtaking vigor and incisive attack, high-spirited yet never brutal. There are the first complete performances of two Chopin works: a beautifully direct, lyrically supple Barcarolle and a spellbinding, restless Scherzo in B minor.
There are also duplicates of works from earlier Kapell recordings, but these late performances are more mature. It may seem absurd to speak of a late period for an artist who died so young. Still, Kapell was consciously striving to deepen his insights and expand his repertory during the last years of his life.
Born in New York in 1922, Kapell studied on scholarship with Olga Samaroff at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music. He drew attention early through his performances of crowd pleasers, including concertos by Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. He made his name in 1942 when, just 19, he played the Piano Concerto by Aram Khachaturian with the New York Philharmonic at Lewisohn Stadium. Composed in 1936, the concerto, a flashy and unabashedly Romantic work, became a jukebox hit when Kapell later recorded it with Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Then, in his late 20s, he studied briefly with the master pianist Artur Schnabel in New York. Dehavenon described going with Kapell to Schnabel’s studio to sit in on lessons. She recalled in particular what Schnabel said about the soulful melody of the slow movement of Schubert’s late Sonata in A.
“He told Willy that this must sound like the first bird that sang in the world,” she said. “Willy never forgot that.” In that last year of his life Kapell was finally “taking on the Beethoven sonatas,” as Dehavenon put it.
The Australian recordings show the results of Kapell’s growing maturity. There is an enchanting performance of Mozart’s Sonata in B flat (K. 570), played with clarity, grace and fleet tempos. Yet for all the charm there is a sure structural cohesion to the interpretation, and not a trace of what often passes for Mozartean cuteness. Another treasure is Kapell’s splendid performance of Bach’s Suite in A Minor (BWV 818), scrupulously honest and sensitive, full of character and dancing energy.
Obviously, with the limitations of home recordings taken from radio broadcasts and the deterioration of acetate discs over the years, there was considerable static and crackle on the original sources. Samuels was able to reduce the noise considerably without diminishing the quality of the piano sound.
For this tour, Dehavenon explained, Kapell, at his own expense, took along two grand pianos that the Steinway company had set aside for his use. This accounts for the “incredibly sonorous bass sound in the recordings,” she said, particularly in the stunningly brilliant and continuously inventive performance of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” A gifted piano student in her own right, she traveled with her husband for part of the tour but returned earlier.
One spectacular discovery from these Australia broadcasts is Kapell’s performance of one of those crowd pleasers, Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, though in this account, with Bernard Heinze conducting the Victorian Symphony Orchestra, the work emerges as an intricate, cagey and innovative 20th-century score.
Though deeply gratified to have these new documents of Kapell’s artistry, Dehavenon cherishes memories of many performances that, she assumes, were never recorded, including accounts of Schubert’s A major Sonata, Mozart’s Concerto in G (K. 453), Chopin’s First Piano Concerto and Copland’s thorny Piano Variations, a work both she and her husband loved.
It would seem that we now have all the Kapell recordings that exist. But as this trove of Australian broadcasts has shown, you never know.
source : IHT
November 21st, 2008 16:58
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