Paul van Kempen (1893 - 1955)

After the war he was found not to have been a Nazi sympathiser, but initially his appearances in Holland could result in audience and orchestral player disapproval, as occurred at a performance of the Verdi Requiem with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam in 1951. Between 1945 and 1949 he directed the annual conductors’ course at the Accademia Chigiana at Siena, and pursued an active career as a guest conductor. He was appointed chief conductor of the Radio Hilversum Philharmonic Orchestra (also known as the Netherlands Radio Orchestra) in 1949, and as the Philips company began to record for the new medium of the long-playing record, van Kempen was engaged by it to record with both this orchestra and a number of others, including the Berlin Philharmonic once more, the Concertgebouw, Lamoureux, and Accademia di Santa Cecilia Orchestras. He returned to Germany in 1953 on his appointment as chief conductor at Bremen, prior to his death in December 1955.

van Kempen’s recordings are notable for their strong sense of architecture combined with much subtle detail and delicate phrasing, qualities very much to the fore in his accompaniments for Wilhelm Kempff’s first, mono, long-playing record accounts of the five Beethoven piano concertos, in which he conducts the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. His pre-war recordings included a memorable account of Liszt’s Les Préludes, with the Berlin Philharmonic. He recorded Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8 with the same orchestra in 1940, as well as the Dvořák Violin Concerto with Váša Příhoda, and the Schumann Cello Concerto with Enrico Mainardi, both made with the Berlin State Opera Orchestra in 1943. Other wartime recordings included symphonies by Schubert, Sibelius and Haydn, all with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra. van Kempen’s post-war recordings included excellent accounts of Tchaikovsky’s Symphonies Nos 5 and 6 and Romeo and Juliet with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 ‘Eroica’, with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. He was a noted interpreter of the music of Bruckner and was awarded the Bruckner Medal in Vienna; however, his only commercial recording of this composer was of the Symphony No. 4 ‘Romantic’, made with the Radio Hilversum Philharmonic Orchestra for the Telefunken label in 1950, while a wartime (1941) broadcast exists of him conducting the Symphony No. 5 with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra.