Classical music: Rediscovering Kapell

By 1953, 31-year-old William Kapell owned the world. A pianist of prodigious gifts in both fingers and brainpower, handsome and happily married, his fame seemed without limit.

That year he had added Australia to his realm, playing 37 concerts in 14 weeks. As fate would have it, these would be his final days. Returning to the United States on Oct. 29, his airplane crashed into a California mountainside, killing everyone aboard.

By miraculous happenstance, a few hours of Kapell's greatness survived from that last journey and have now been captured for the two-disc set "William Kapell Rediscovered: The Australian Broadcasts" on Sony BMG.

Equipped with primitive needle-to-acetate gear, a hobbyist named Ray Preston recorded about 10,000 hours of Australian broadcasts. Among their fragile contents were Kapell's two recitals at Melbourne Town Hall.

Some of this playing found its way onto bootleg CDs. Suspecting that there might be more, Maurice Austin, an enthusiast friend of Preston's, rummaged through the trove and was rewarded with broadcasts of solo recitals, concertos with orchestra, chamber music -- some in various stages of deterioration, but others vivid and restorable.

Restoration

Austin then set about locating Kapell family members on the Internet. He got through to grandson Joshua Kapell on Oct. 29, 2003, the 50-year anniversary of Kapell's death. With the family's blessing, the task of restoring the work of this gone-but-not-forgotten American genius began in earnest. Another grandson, recording engineer Eliot Leigh, assisted in the production.

"I was so anxious to involve him in the project," said Kapell's widow, Anna Lou Dehavenon, "that I paid his salary myself."

Married to Kapell in 1948, Dehavenon had once considered a piano career of her own but blended it into domesticity and a love of four-hand duets. She and their two sons were with him on the Australia tour, returning on a different flight. In later years she earned a doctorate as an anthropologist studying family hunger and homelessness.

Even through the unavoidable static and radio interference of amateur technology, there is sheer poetry in these performances of Debussy's "Suite Bergamasque," resounding with the texture of a Monet garden. A late Mozart sonata is joyously patterned. Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" becomes an exuberant, coloristic riot.

"What is most astounding is that these recordings are the only ones that preserve Kapell's playing in his maturity, after he had abandoned the show-off concertos and begun studying the classical repertory, but when the studio recordings had begun to taper off," Dehavenon said.

"They also have the great bass notes of his own pianos, which he insisted in taking along on his Australian tour," she added. "He knew that there'd be no such instruments down there."

Through the scratching and the static, these precious discs preserve a magnificence that must be reckoned immeasurably sad. Kapell's widow spoke of projects unfulfilled: a chamber-music series with Jascha Heifetz, a delving into the music of Schubert. Now, at least, we can hear more clearly what went down with that plane, 55 years ago.