Beethoven Symphonies Nos. 2 and 4 – Kempe

Rudolf Kempe never quite got his due, not in his lifetime and not much since — a conductor overshadowed by the Karajan machine, working steadily in Munich and Dresden while the marketing departments chased bigger names with bigger egos. The reappearance of these Beethoven recordings, made with the Munich Philharmonic, is something of a small event. Not a revelation, exactly. Kempe was never a revelatory conductor. He was something rarer: reliable in the deepest sense, an artist who trusted the score to do the talking and got out of its way.

The Symphony No. 2 in D major opens here with a spring in its step that a lot of conductors miss entirely, hearing the piece — wrongly — as a mere way station between the First Symphony’s Haydn-and-water charm and the seismic arrival of the Eroica. Kempe doesn’t condescend to it. The introduction has real weight, the strings dark and grainy in a way that tells you this orchestra still had some old Central European sound in its bones, not yet planed smooth by decades of recording-studio uniformity. Woodwinds pop out of the texture with personality. You can practically hear individual players leaning into their solos, unafraid of a little rasp on the oboe, unashamed of the horns’ slight roughness at the top.

The finale is the point of the whole symphony for me, always has been, ever since I first heard it as a teenager without knowing the name of the composer and getting embarrassed later at how obviously Beethoven it was, that impatient, stuttering wit. Kempe times it beautifully. The jokes land. There’s a difference between a conductor who understands that this movement is funny and one who simply plays it fast, and Kempe belongs to the first camp. The phrasing has air in it, little hesitations before the sudden accelerations that let you feel the surprise rather than just register the tempo change.

Compare this with Celibidache, who recorded the same symphony with the same orchestra near the end of his long Munich tenure, at a tempo some twenty percent slower, all incense and suspended time, gorgeous in its way but exhausting if you ask it to do what Beethoven’s markings actually ask. Celibidache turns the piece into contemplation. Kempe lets it be what it is: young man’s music, impatient, brilliant, a little cocky.

The Fourth is the finer achievement of the two, though, and it’s the one I’d point newcomers toward first.

Schumann called this symphony “a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants,” which is cute but slightly misleading. There’s nothing fragile about it, not in a performance like this one. The opening Adagio, with its harmonic fog, its sense of Beethoven groping toward B-flat major as though the tonic itself were in doubt, gets exactly the tension it needs from Kempe: unhurried but never slack, the pizzicato basses audible as distinct events rather than a rumble. Then the Allegro vivace breaks loose and the whole orchestra seems to exhale.

Berlioz thought the second movement had been dictated by an archangel — sentimental nonsense, probably, but listening to the Munich strings breathe through that long melodic line, the horns entering with such rounded warmth underneath, you understand why a fellow Romantic reached for that kind of language. It is one of Beethoven’s great slow movements, and Kempe treats it with unaffected tenderness, no interpretive underlining, no interpretive anything really. Just the music allowed to sing.

His tempo for the third movement gets the balance right between scherzo energy and the trio’s rustic geniality, which trips up more conductors than you’d expect. Some rush the trio and flatten its charm. Others drag it into ponderousness. And the finale barrels home with an exhilaration that sounds almost live, edge-of-seat, the bassoon’s chattering triplets thrown off with real dash.

Is this a first choice over Carlos Kleiber, or Wand, or — for period instincts — Gardiner? No, and I wouldn’t pretend otherwise. But this isn’t really a disc competing on those terms. It’s a document of a conductor who understood this repertory from the inside, working with an orchestra that plays as though it means it, captured in sound that has aged remarkably well. At bargain price, that’s not a small thing to offer. Recommended, and warmly.