Rudolf Kempe - Staatskapelle Dresden

Igor Strawinski - Der Feuervogel (Ballet Suite)
Benjamin Britten - Sinfonia Da Requiem Op.20

The secret commander of the Dresden Staatskapelle

Born in Niederpoyritz near Dresden in 1910, Rudolf Kempe was trained as a pianist and oboist at the orchestral school of the Sächsische Staatskapelle in Dresden between 1924 and 1928.

After posts as an orchestra musician in Dortmund and Leipzig he made his debut as a conductor in Leipzigin 1935. After further conducting posts in Chemnitz and Weimar he was brought to Dresden in 1949 by Joseph Keilberth and made General Music Director of the Dresden Opera and Staatskapelle the following year. Semper’s famous opera house lay in ruins, like the whole of the city centre, whereas the evacuated Staatskapelle had survived the war and the post-war years largely intact. With an ensemble that included Gottlob Frick, Kurt Böhme, Elfriede Trötschel, Christel Goltz and other great artists, the new GMD had a splendid vocal team at his disposal.

Kempe later recalled: “For my career, those were the happiest years of my life – the last glimpse of ‘Paradise’: with opera, concerts and chamber music all year round in the same place.”

In the early 1950s notable directors and singers were shunning Dresden, if only because the “cultural politics” of Dresden opera were getting in the way of staging actual performances. Rudolf Kempe finally gave up the Dresden post in 1953.

The fact that on the day of the planned award of the National Prize in 1952 he chose to make a guest appearance at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich and moved there soon afterwards did not endear him to the cultural functionaries of the GDR. While the conductor soon made his mark at his new place of work in Bavaria and was acclaimed in the great music hubs of Europe, producing numerous important gramophone recordings for EMI, Kempe was initially declared persona non grata in East Germany. A variety of political interventions and unfriendly signals from the GDR prevented any further work with the Dresden orchestra. It took twelve years for Kempe to return to Dresden for a 1965 concert with the Staatskapelle. Even after feeling the icy draught of Cold War politics, he was as much at home with the orchestra as ever and launched into a new phase of intensive collaboration.

By the time Kempe made his fi rst gramophone records for Eterna and EMI with his 1968 Ariadne auf Naxos, the Eterna team had 60 recordings with the Dresden Staatskapelle to its credit. Converted into an ultra-modern studio, the city’s Lukaskirche offered ideal conditions for the increased recording workload in Dresden. Kempe followed up Ariadne with the complete orchestral works of Richard Strauss on fourteen Eterna LPs between 1970 and 1975 – a cycle important enough to remain a benchmark today and one that confi rmed the reputation of the Staatskapelle as one of the leading Strauss orchestras.

It was in the years between 1968 and 1975, when the Staatskapelle had no principal conductor at its head, that collaborative ventures with international guest conductors were of such great importance.

Even if Kempe was only in Dresden for a few weeks each year, those weeks together always paid dividends. Though there were many concerts and recordings at the time with famous conductors such as Karl Böhm, Herbert von Karajan and Carlos Kleiber and the future head of the Staatskapelle Herbert Blomstedt was being intensively canvassed, it was Kempe who despite his limited time in Dresden was effectively the secret commander of the orchestra, laying down essential artistic markers.

Kempe was enthusiastic about his Dresden Staatskapelle in a 1974 radio interview: “I think the particular bond between me and the Kapelle is due to the fact that I am from Dresden too and that as a teenager I practically grew up into the Dresden orchestra.”

Rudolf Kempe’s early death prevented the implementation of numerous planned projects with the Staatskapelle, one of them being a cycle of Richard Strauss operas continuing from the already recorded Ariadne. When the present recording was made in January 1976 none of the participants had an inkling that it would be Kempe’s last.

Eterna producer Dieter-Gerhardt Worm considers Rudolf Kempe to be one of the most significant conductors of the twentieth century and regards the recordings he made with the Dresden Staatskapelle as ideal:

“There have surely been very few conductors who have fathomed the nature of the Staatskapelle so deeply and so widely exploited this orchestra’s potential as Rudolf Kempe. In the studio, he was a highly effective ‘worker’. Kempe was the only conductor I have known who did not explain to the musicians what he wanted of the orchestra but simply showed them.

“Normally recording sessions went like this: Studio rehearsal, then a trial recording, then we would listen to the recording together in the control room. Kempe said what he didn’t like and I backed him up and told him where I thought there was room for improvement. And then Kempe went out, with not another word about what we had discussed, showed what he wanted and everything worked. That is uncanny, I have never encountered it with any other conductor, not even Karajan – this absolute command of signalling, so that the orchestra gave him whatever he wanted, just from his showing the orchestra what that was.”

His secret lay – as a critic concluded in 1974 – as it were in the tip of his baton.

Ringo Gruchenberg
Translation: Janet and Michael Berridge

In memory of Rudolf Kempe (1910–1976)

When this record was made in early 1976, there was nothing to suggest that it would be the last recording ever to be directed by Rudolf Kempe. By that time Kempe had already committed to directing a major recording project, featuring all the instrumental works of Richard Strauss. A further, no less significant project was to follow, covering all of Strauss’s operas. On May 12, 1976, Rudolf Kempe died unexpectedly in Zurich at 65 years of age, one of the most refined and versatile conductors of our time.

This brilliant music-maker at the rostrum, who was acclaimed for his amazingly relaxed and elegant conducting style, his extremely sensitive feeling for sound and his effortless, instinctively sound interpretation of music, loved Mozart, Wagner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák and contemporary classical composers. But he is most closely associated with Richard Strauss. He met all the necessary criteria for a stylistically distinctive and authentic rendering of Strauss’s music. Under his direction, many works gained a new radiance, a new elegance; Kempe’s records of Strauss bear impressive testimony to the qualities of his vivacious musicianship.

Our sensitivity to the fin-de-siècle pathos that lies in some of Strauss’s symphonic works is in fact what makes the lack of emotional charge in this style of performance particularly impressive, a light, vividly real musicality that lends transparency to the enormous and sometimes ambiguous scores. Anyone who followed Kempe’s career from his sensational time in Dresden, which was the starting point of his international career, knows that in his collaboration with the Dresden Staatskapelle he adopted a progressive approach so as to render Strauss’s music in an ever more subtle, rhythmically sharp, refined and light-footed fashion. Trained as a musician in the orchestral school of the Dresden Staatskapelle and progressing to principal conductor at the head of the Dresden State Opera, he knew how to play this “instrument” with unparalleled sensitivity and attentiveness to nuance. He knew how to utilise this orchestra’s ability to play espressivos bursting with emotion as well as incredibly beautiful pianissimos that were as quiet as a whisper. What is particularly appealing is that Kempe is not concerned with incessantly “pulling out the stops” and producing overinflated vividness; instead he looks to achieve what might be called a scintillating, chamber-music-inspired refinement, a style that is dynamically well balanced throughout, light-hearted, brilliantly jaunty, without superfluous emotion or sentimentality.

He was born in the Niederpoyritz district of Dresden on June 14, 1910. His teachers at the orchestral school of the Dresden Staatskapelle were Johannes König, who played oboe in the Staatskapelle, Kurt Striegler, the accomplished kapellmeister of the State Opera, for theory and Walther Bachmann for piano. Kempe would later enjoy playing piano parts in the concertos written by Bach and Mozart for several pianos. He became principal flautist at the Dortmund Opera at 18 years of age. He assumed the same role in the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra from 1929 until 1936; he also worked as a rehearsal pianist at the Leipzig Opera. Emulating the previous achievement of the cellist Arturo Toscanini, Kempe progressed from his chair in the oboe section to the conductor’s rostrum. In 1936 he stout-heartedly stepped in to rescue a performance of Lortzing’s comic opera Der Wildschütz (“The Poacher”), thus making his debut as a conductor.

His service in Leipzig led to appointments as kapellmeister at the opera house in Chemnitz and subsequently as general music director at the National Theatre of Weimar. In 1949 he was appointed to succeed Joseph Keilberth at the Dresden State Opera. All at once, this artist’s tall, slender figure was brought to the fore of the international music scene. He was a conductor in Vienna in 1950; he worked as general music director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich from 1952 to 1954, taking over the baton from Georg Solti. He was the first German conductor to be called to the Metropolitan Opera in New York after the war, where he directed Arabella and Tannhäuser. The Covent Garden Opera Company in London commissioned him to conduct Wagner’s “Ring”; in Salzburg he was entrusted with a performance of Palestrina; Bayreuth hired him for the Ring cycle too. He appeared as a guest at the Edinburgh Festival; he frequently conducted the Berlin Philharmonic, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and performances for the Italian broadcaster RAI. Kempe was a modest musician who excelled with his clear gestures without ever appearing at all arrogant; he placed the human aspect before perfectionism and developed into an eminent conductor with a very personal appeal. In 1961 he succeeded Sir Thomas Beecham as director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of London; in 1965 he became director of the Tonhalle Orchestra of Zurich; in 1967 he became GMD of the Munich Philharmonic. On January 27, 1976, he conducted the Staatskapelle in Dresden, the city of his birth, for the last time.

It is equally important to note Kempe’s success as a conductor for the record industry. He was an ideal performance partner for orchestral musicians, music directors and tonmeisters. His cooperative and courteous manner was surely the secret to his success. Rudolf Kempe, who approached every recording with an idea that was fully thought through down to the last detail, realised his plans without domineering over others in an overly regimented way. He was a man of few words but accomplished much in relatively little time. This record has fortunately retained some of his subtle manner of music-making.

Benjamin Britten wrote the Sinfonia da Requiem op. 20 during the Second World War at 26 years of age. It is considered one of his few large-scale orchestral works and demonstrates his great compositional skill, his ability to incorporate a very wide range of old and new musical initiatives in his works without disowning his own original style; quite significantly, the work underscores his humanistic outlook, which he once summed up as follows: “I believe that an artist should be part of his community, should work for it, with it, and be used by it.” The titles of the three movements that follow one another without any breaks mirror the progression of a requiem, thus illustrating the British composer’s intention to express certain views of his in the music. Centred on the key of D major, the work is characterised by a serious intensity of expression and a remarkable thematic coherence. After some severe orchestral blows the first movement (Lacrymosa) sees the cellos take up the lugubrious main theme in persistent, heavy syncopation in 6/8 time; this theme is linked to all the other themes, including the saxophone motif with the tension-filled seventh interval; the second movement paints a picture of horror and dread (Dies irae), starting with a rhythmically accentuated flute motif in pianissimo before building up to create bizarre escalations. Accompanied by swaying harp sounds, the final movement (Requiem aeternam) starts with an expressively tranquil “song” in the flutes. The middle section of the three-part finale sees the strings play the funereal theme of the first movement in a modified, elucidated form. The continuous surge of feeling and the final passage, which ends quietly, eventually give rise to optimism.

The premiere of The Firebird in Paris in 1910 consolidated the international standing of the 28-year-old Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) as a ballet composer (followed by Petrushka in 1911 and The Rite of Spring in 1913). The Russian fairytale of the Firebird is based on the age-old humanistic idea of the triumph of good over evil: the beautiful Tsarevna has been taken prisoner by the evil sorcerer Kashchei. Prince Ivan Tsarevich sets out to rescue her. He captures the colourful Firebird and, upon releasing her, is given one of her magical feathers, which helps him to disempower and kill the evil sorcerer, thus saving all of those imprisoned under Kashchei’s spell. They celebrate the bravery of their liberator, who takes the beautiful Tsarevna as his bride. The suite evokes visions from the ballet in a display of symphonic intensity. Igor Stravinsky’s score is in some respects indebted to his mentor Rimsky-Korsakov, notably the practice of portraying people in diatonic themes reminiscent of folk songs while characterising the fairytale figures by means of chromatic themes with oriental colouring. On the whole, however, The Firebird is a work of Stravinsky’s very own making, packed with shimmering colours, spontaneously engaging, vibrant rhythms and creative energy. When Kashchei and his minions perform their diabolical dance in the most audacious section of the score, Stravinsky’s typically Russian temperament comes to the fore for the first time in an orgiastic escalation of wild rhythms. Moreover, the melodic substance, the many lyrical highlights and the sublimely radiant expressiveness of the ending are without precedent in 20th century ballet music.

Eckart Schwinger (original LP sleeve notes, 1977)

Translation: J & M Berridge

Translator's note: original quote by Benjamin Britten from his speech on receiving the honorary freedom of the Borough of Aldeburgh on October 22, 1962.

Label: Eterna