In the years after Sir Thomas Beecham died in 1961, when various powers-that-be were seeking to undermine his orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic, Rudolf Kempe as his successor would conduct the RPO in defiant Sunday evening concerts at the Swiss Cottage Odeon. The ones I attended were great occasions, and I specially remember a wonderful Kempe performance of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, a visionary reading, deeply meditative in the slow movement.
So it is here in an exceptional performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, dedicated, with a rapt and refined slow movement bringing pianissimo s of breathtaking delicacy. The extreme dynamic contrasts are beautifully caught against the Albert Hall acoustic by the BBC engineers (sadly not named), and now superbly transferred with the freshest results, in vivid sound typical of the whole disc.
The wonder is that in conveying this depth of meditation, Kempe adopts a flowing speed, not a markedly slow one. So the opening cor anglais solo, for all the subtlety of the playing, has a folk-like innocence, which poignantly reflects the emotions of Dvorak in American exile.
The other three movements similarly involve dramatic extremes of dynamic, at once tender and intimate in lyrical passages, sharply incisive in big tutti s, with the timpani vivid and immediate throughout. Again, the Slavonic flavour comes over strongly. As Cordula Kempe, widow of the conductor, points out in an interview in the notes, Dresden as Kempe’s home city ‘is only spitting distance from Prague’.
These three performances – a curious mixture for a single disc, but each presented with rare intensity – come from the two Prom concerts that Kempe conducted in August 1975 on the very eve of his taking over as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in succession to Pierre Boulez. Plainly the players were responding with joy to the new man, who combined precise control to match Boulez’s with intense passion.
Cordula Kempe’s interview goes on to relate this reading of Beethoven’s Leonore No 3 Overture to Kempe’s work in the opera house. Rightly so, when this too could hardly be more dramatic, with each change of mood sharply defined. So the emergence of the main Allegro theme in a brightly glowing C major (track 1, 4'10) leads to violent conflict in the development section, with horns blazing, until the off-stage trumpet (7'30) is heard making just as powerful an impact as in the opera house. From there each section piles joy on joy until the final coda seems to burst over in frenzy.
The Prokofiev Suite finds Kempe just as much at home in a sharply characterised performance full of grotesquerie, involving a wide range of expression. With well-defined contrasts of light and shade, bite and tenderness, it becomes more than a sequence of genre pieces. A very welcome issue