As a couple of you may know, of those playing today, I've become quite an
admirer of the playing of young pianist Freddy Kempf.

His second CD (the first was on Schumann) which came out in early May is,
I feel, spectacularly good and, while as fiery as one would expect with
Rachmaninoff, it's also more internal and poetic than you usually hear
Rachmaninoff played.

The reviews offline in the 'real world' have been fairly ecstatic and now
we have the ones online at Classical Music on the Web and I thought some
might be interested in reading the two that just went up:

   http://www.musicweb.uk.net/classrev/2000/june00/kempfrachmaninov.htm

I've included excerpts and a link to them at the CD pages I keep for
Kempf, at http://andrys.com/freddyk.html -- the latter page leads to
the CD info/reviews for both discs, for any who might be further interested
in this pianist.  In the U.S., concert engagements in the major halls are
hard to get unless you're one of the top few well-known names in the
business, as concert-management worries about filling halls and of course
making back their money.  I'm hoping that this page and Neil Thump's at
http://freddy-kempf.net will help with that, as I'd like to see him back
here in the U.S.  I first heard him in a small almost unknown college in
Fremont, in February of '99.  A lot has happened since then, including the
release of these two cds (the first two in a series of 10 for BIS) and
we'll see.

Andrys in Berkeley
http://www.andrys.com/books.html   search sheet music, videos, CDs
http://www.andrys.com/cbooks.html  newer classical music books