Paul van Kempen

Paul van Kempen ( born May 16, 1893 in Zoeterwoude, South Holland, † December 8, 1955 in Amsterdam) was a Dutch- German conductor.

Kempen studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory from 1910-13, composition and conducting with Julius Röntgen and Bernard Zweers, violin with Louis Zimmerman. From 1913 he played with only 20 years second fiddle in the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Willem Mengelberg, a year later the first violin. In 1916 he turned to because of his sense of belonging to German culture German orchestras and was, among other things Concertmaster in Poznan, Bad Nauheim and Dortmund. In 1932 he participated in the German citizenship. After two years as Music Director in Oberhausen, he was from 1934 to 1942 chief conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic. The orchestra was developed under his leadership one of the best in Germany. In 1942, he was followed by Herbert von Karajan as General Music Director of the Symphony Orchestra Aachen, the activity ended in 1944 with the wartime collapse of German cultural life. After the war he was in 1949 conductor of the Philharmonic Radio Orchestra Hilversum, however, was in the Netherlands because of its previous activities in Germany quite unpopular. A concert at the Concertgebouw in 1951 had to be canceled due to riots, his ambitions for a fixed conducting activities with the Concertgebouw Orchestra were hopeless. In 1953 he returned therefore as general music director in Bremen back to Germany. He died in 1955 in an Amsterdam hospital from liver disease at the age of only 62 years ago, when his career was just conceived again on the rise.

Van Kempen, a great admirer of Willem Mengelberg, still belonged to a romantic - free generation of conductors who sought by tempo fluctuations and idiosyncratic interpretations of a personal interpretation. During his time in Dresden, he made ​​a series of recordings of symphonic works and some instrumental concertos with soloists Wilhelm Kempff and Enrico Mainardi for the German Grammophon. After the war, his wild and gloomy images of the fifth and sixth symphony by Tchaikovsky and shorter works such as the 1812 Overture were famous, were the first of the 1950 newly founded Philips Phonographic Industry with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, as well as the third, seventh and eighth Beethoven Symphony for the same label.

" Had van Kempen lived longer, would be without a doubt the mantle of Furtwängler fallen to him instead of Klemperer. "