FRANK MORANA
AmerOrganist 37/7

WILHELM KEMPFF, Fantasie und Fuge in D, op. 5. Edition Walhall (EW 240), Verlag Franz Biersack, Richard-Wagner Str. 3, D-39106 Magdeburg, Germany, <info-edition-walhall@freenet.de>. Despite his international stature as a pianist, Wilhelm Kempff (1895–1991) was a lifelong proponent of the organ, and his initial professional calling was that of a concert organist. As a composer, he had once been urged by his teacher, the Brahms pupil Robert Kahn, to abandon performance in favor of composition. His works include hundreds of vocal pieces––lieder, cantatas, operas––as well as chamber music and two symphonies, one of which was premiered by the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester under Furtwängler. If we tend to think of Kempff as a “modern” (perhaps because his discography is still so readily available), the present composition, composed in 1917 and revised in later years, tells us otherwise. Though elegantly and correctly written, the piece bears almost no trace of the fact that, by that time, the seven-tone, “do-re-me” system was already superceded in the minds of most forward-thinking musicians. The piece itself was dedicated to one of Kempff’s earliest and most prominent patrons, the Swedish cleric (and later Nobel peace prizewinner) Nathan Soerderblom. It incorporates a quote from the Lutheran liturgy (“Dona nobis pacem”) and centers very strongly around the D-minor (dorian) tonality, though in the fugue, a short middle-section in a new motion and in the remote key of A-flat provides a contrasting and progressive stroke. The registration markings are conceived for a four-manual instrument, but they are not so urgent as to preclude an effective performance on any instrument with a rich plenum, a few good solo stops, and a performer who identifies with the time, place, and genre that mark this piece so clearly.