Hard on the heels of Artur Schnabel's grandiloquent Second Symphony (Musical Observations, 9/92) comes a rare opportunity to sample the compositional prowess of another great pianist, the late Wilhelm Kempff. Kempff wrote orchestral scores, chamber music and songs, but his pupil Idil Biret has wisely confined herself to a selection of piano transcriptions and two original works of modest ambition. There is little to object to in the supporting documentation, though I was not exactly swept away by the ardour of Biret's advocacy. She is always eminently cool and clear, though without perhaps that special lucidity of tone which marked the playing of her teacher; it is not her fault that the lower octaves of the piano are not perfectly tuned, while the characteristically cramped acoustic of the Heidelberg studio serves to exaggerate any flaws.
Two of the Bach transcriptions she includes turned up recently in Stanislav Bunin's controversial Bach recital (EMI). In the most familiar of them, the dubious Siciliano, Biret is calm and collected, touching in the pedal notes like baroque organ stops (Kempff was himself an accomplished organist); Bunin, by contrast, is hugely expressive, relishing the inauthenticity of the exercise. Biret is just a shade dull and literal in the Chorale Prelude Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ; again Bunin goes to the other extreme with an almost impossibly broad and romantic reading. Both his instrument and the EMI recording rather show up the defi-ciencies of the Marco Polo technicians, but of course the two recitals are not directly compar- able, and many readers will want to know what to expect of Kempff's own music.
It would be difficult to imagine anything less like Schnabel's exploratory expressionism. These are cautious, charming and mostly lyrical miniatures—not even noticeably German in their eclectic borrowings. Despite his fame as a Beethovenian, Kempff was a notable exponent of Chopin and that composer's influence is occasionally felt in the piano figuration. More surprising is the apparent presence of Debussy and the Rus-sians more or less throughout! The Italian Suite begins with a virtual paraphrase of Ravel's ''Le Gibet'' from Gaspard, and proceeds via a delightful ''Pastorale'', more folksy than volkish—some delightful articulation here from Biret—and a keening, monodic ''Lamento'' to a final ''Notturno'' of definite (albeit Mussorgskian) charm. The (second) Piano Sonata is oddly structured: there's a fleeting scherzo wedged between a lumbering seven-minute movement entitled ''Preambulum'', a sort of traumatized cakewalk, and a stylistically evasive ''Introduzione e Toccata'' which I didn't quite grasp. While it would be interesting to hear again Kempff's own playing in Bach, Biret's unusual compilation is unlikely to be outclassed in the near future and the playing time is generous.'