Pianist Freddy Kempf adds an extra dimension to his performances

Pianist Freddy Kempf also conducts on the Pianomania tour with the NZ Symphony Orchestra.

Freddy Kempf has played piano since he was four years old, so it's little wonder after more than three decades he's sought to add an extra dimension to his performances. The versatile pianist, soon to turn 40, conducts from his keyboard.

"The whole conducting thing is relatively recent for me," says Kempf, who conducted on his 2015 tour. "It's kind of evolved and I don't know where it's going. Conductor friends tell me that they've always had this dream of standing up in front of an orchestra but I've loved the sound of the piano since I was two and have always wanted to play it."

Earlier this year, Kempf played the complete Rachmaninov Second Concerto with the Moscow Philharmonic and he's amused by one critic praising them for turning a warhorse into a prize thoroughbred.

"In fact, playing the concerto night after night, I was very aware of having to play just its second movement in Pianomania, and I paid more attention than usual, knowing I would also have conducting duties in a few months' time.

The concept behind the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra Pianomania, his fifth tour with the orchestra, didn't come from Kempf.

"We'd gone through numerous ideas after the Beethoven visit and it would have felt strange if I just came back and did a couple of concertos. Above all, the orchestra wanted something that only I could do."

After various possibilities were touted, it ended up being a potted history of the keyboard concerto from Handel (1685-1759) to Gershwin (1898-1937). Handel might seem an unlikely starting point, with Friday's concert launched by one of the composer's Opus 4 organ concertos.

"I love Handel because he wasn't a fan of the piano at the time," Kempf says. "This piece will be such a powerful opening to the concert as there's nothing quite as dramatic as Handel."

Kempf looks forward to improvising during this concerto, as much of Handel's writing leaves space for the soloist to elaborate. As a conductor, he points to tricky moments where his irregular keyboard patterning doesn't necessarily share the same pulse and stress as the orchestra around him.

In total, he has six piano concertos on the schedule for Pianomania, but only Chopin's Andante spianato et Grande Polonaise brillante and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue are complete works, the remainder are delivered in single-movement chunks. With the inclusion of the Rachmaninov and Mozart's Elvira Madigan Andante, Pianomania offers an evening of palpable crowd-pleasers.

On previous tours with the NZSO, Kempf has played fairly standard repertoire - Beethoven and Prokofiev in 2007, the Rachmaninov Third in 2010, Gershwin in 2012 and Beethoven three years later.

Now, he says he does have some repertoire regrets, having long wanted to tackle Leonard Bernstein's 1949 The Age of Anxiety.

"It's never done in concert and that's a shame," he says. "In fact, I've been asking to do it for the last ten years and not managed to get it into a programme."

However, the 39-year-old pianist has no regrets about his chosen career path which set off with his playing a Mozart concerto with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra when he was eight years old.

At school, it turns out that he was very much drawn to golf, playing three to four hours a day at the local course.

"Looking back now, I'm lucky to have stuck with the piano," he says. "Now, in the middle of my career, I'm always learning something which would be quite a rare thing in any other field.

"I must admit that I enjoy the pressure and the thrill of putting yourself through something. You can express ideas through the music, which wouldn't have happened if I'd chosen golf. That's something I would have missed."

What: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra: Pianomania
Where & when: Auckland Town Hall, Friday; Claudelands Arena, Hamilton, Saturday.