Kempff plays Schubert

There is something so uninhibited about Wilhelm Kempff's playing, as though he's speaking the music. When Artur Schnabel played the Viennese classics, it was like a religious rite - overwhelming us with the uncompromising severity of this music, as though to say 'listen to how profound this is!' When Kempff played, it was like a late-night conversation, with profundities tossed offhand that would astound people in a less intimate setting. Since Kempff, other pianists have gotten as deeply inside Schubert - Brendel, Lupu, Curzon et al... but no other pianist has ever reached the same 'more things in the heaven and the earth' plane to which Kempff brought us.