BBC Legends BCL 4215-2, 78:03 (Distrib. Koch) ****:
From the BBC archives we have two distinct concerts spliced together, featuring the gifted Dresden-born conductor Rudolf Kempe (1910-1976) who would assume leadership of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra after the passing of Sir Thomas Beecham. A coloristic literalist, Kempe opens (18 February 1976, less than three months prior to his death) with one of the few British works with which he became familiar, Tippett’s sparkling Double Concerto, with its simultaneous homage to both Corelli and Vaughan Williams. The vivid part writing and polyphony explode in the outer movements, while a long-lined serenity pervades the Adagio cantabile.
For the Berg Concerto (18 February 1976) Kempe has as his soloist Edith Peinemann (b. 1937) and her 1732 Guarnerius del Gesu with “its fantastic D string.” The concerto has a long history in Peinemann’s repertory, and she plies its valedictory message to its dedicatory “angel,” Manon Gropius, with lyrical and dramatic flair. Kempe’s accompaniment swells beyond the merely decorative into gusts of visceral passion and histrionic laments, each tempered by a poignant melancholy. Winds and harp urge their presence forward in the Bach cantata which infiltrates the second half. As for Peinemann, she achieves equally songful and rasping textures, always pliant and often exalted. The angular nature of Berg’s musical syntax flows out in the manner of Kandinsky or Klee. With a shimmering final chord, the audience erupts into grateful applause.
Having made a stunning, recorded version of Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass, Kempe came naturally to the ripe brass fanfares of the Sinfonietta (12 October 1975) with the BBC, whose principal conductor Kempe had become that same year, 1975. The sarcastic second movement enjoys the same color and pointed rhythmic thrust as Kempe’s renowned inscription of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride. Again, liquid strings, winds, and harp underpin the brass (especially the BBC trombone) invocations of the Moderato section–the flute sails into the stratosphere. The last movement plays like a fairy-tale epilogue, maybe a touch of Rimsky-Korsakov among the disparate, dissonant echoes that wend their way up from a delirious sea of pipings and brass orisons.
— Gary Lemco
