Customer Reviews

Kempe Conducts Richard Strauss, Vol. 1

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Rudolf Kempe (1910-76) was born Dresden where he led the Opera and the Stattskapelle from 1949-52. After a lifetime of conducting around Europe, he returned to Dresden late in his life to make his famous box of orchestral recordings by fellow Dresdener Richard Strauss (1864-1949.) This three-fer represents a third of Kempe's overall output, which is still available in a big box here and from Musical Heritage Society.

I purchased the collection at hand for a number of reasons. First, I wanted Kempe's humanistic Ein Heldenleben, Strauss's self-portrait of himself as the romantic era hero. Second, I wanted it with more tracks than the one track cheapie EMI now markets. Third, I didn't want to pay much for it. I was able to buy this three-CD box for around $5 from an Amazon vendor, making all the other stuff a bonus acquisition.

My greatest unexpected joy is Peter Damm's recordings of the two Horn Concertos, No. 1 from early in Strauss's life and No. 2 from very late. I'd not previously heard Damm in this music, for which Dennis Brain and Barry Tuckwell own critical oligopolies. I've heard Brain, whose horn sounds like a trombone and whose tone is silken yet firm as lead, and admit he is a player nonpareil. Tuckwell's not quite in the same league but certainly one of the greats on the instrument.

Damm, born 1937 in East Germany's Meiningen, is an Eastern European player that was trained in the old world style Slavic players behind the Iron Curtain used, a sound that made the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra famous. His tone is full of wail and vibrato, a style considered hopelessly old-fashioned anathema in 2010. Aside from the walk down memory lane quality of his playing, I found a relaxed approach in this musis by the team of Kempe and Damm that was most appealing.

My previous exposure to this music, from Brain, Marie Luise Neunecker, Frank Lloyd, Myron Bloom and some others, has usually tilted more toward the virtuosic. While Kempe provides full-blooded accompaniment, Damm is laid-back and relaxed in the music. A similar thread runs through Manfred Clement's work in the Oboe Concerto and Duett-Concertino. I found all this very enjoyable, especially on renewed listening. Where the overt viruosity in the horn concertos became tiresome to me previously, these prformances maintain their freshness over and over.

The Kempe-Dresden Stattskapelle collaboration on the composer's tone poems Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, Don Juan and Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life) have been famous for years and were highly ranked in most critical review publications including the The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music and Classical Music Third Ear. One listen to these works tells you why Kempe's work endures over decades: he invests Strauss with humanity other conductors don't seem able to address. Under Kempe, these are living, breathing works of art as opposed to musical scores.

The one portion of this collection I find forgettable is the disk dedicated to Strauss's piano-dominated music -- Burleske for piano and orchestra, Parergon zur Sinfonia Domestica, Op. 73, and Panathenaenzug, Op. 74 with pianists Peter Mirring, Malcolm Frager and Peter Rosel, respectively. Strauss's piano-based scores fail to move me in the say way as the other music in the collection. The performances are in a vein with the horn and clarinet music -- intimate as opposed to bombastic and virtuosic, relaxed and smaller in scale than the portraits some other pianists paint.

If these pieces appeal to you and you like Strauss dialed down a bit, you will enjoy this collection. At the price people ask, it'll cost around $10 to find out, not much to pay for some of Rudolf Kempe's most memorable recordings in modern sound.