LOUIS KENTNER PLAYS

On this page, Louis Kentner plays the piano music of Beethoven, Chopin and other composers. Unlike some pianists who have made a career performing the works of Franz Liszt, this great pianist is every bit as wonderful in his approach to composers of greatly differing styles.  Perhaps it is precisely because he brings the same care and and depth of understanding with which he plays the works of composers of the stature of Beethoven and Chopin to those of Liszt that his playing of Liszt is on a plane so vastly superior to that of those pianists who see in most of Liszt"s music little more than merely a vehicle for showing off their manual dexterity.

It was via a budget label record that I was introduced to the Transcendental Etudes by Sergei Lyapunov. These are amazing studies, very much an extension of the Liszt studies of the same name, and rightly dedicated to Liszt. I urge you to make it a priority to get to know them. Louis Kentner plays the set of twelve etudes, and doubtless from the same recording, below. A piano roll recording of the final etude by Lyapunov himself can be found at the end of Kentner's compete set.

Louis Kentner was also a marvelous interpreter of the works of Chopin. Under his fingers, the larger pieces, Ballades, Barcarolle, Polonaise-fantaisie, Scherzi, demonstrate for all to hear Chopin's genius for dramatic structure. His is not the Chopin of the salon but the Chopin of the Academie Française.

And his recording of the Brahms second piano concerto under the baton of the wonderful conductor Sir Adrian Boult is one of my favorites.

Mozart  Piano Concerto 12 in A major, K 414
Sir Thomas Beecham conducting the London Philarmonic Orchestra

i Allegro
10:18 ➢ ii Andante
17:59 ➢ iii Allegretto

recorded in 1940