Rudolf Kempe Birthday Concert

The Rudolf Kempe Birthday Concert of 2019, For the Love of Art – or The Art of Love, was Programme III of the Rudolf Kempe Society’s 2019 Songs of Apollo Word and Music season at Stratford-upon-Avon. It brought together the young wind players of The Zephyr Ensemble from the Guildhall School of Music – the Society’s Young Artists of 2019 – with the actor Ruth Lass, the conductor and pianist Anthony Negus, and Zubin Varla, the Society’s Artist in Residence for 2019, who chose the poetry by Shelley, Whitman, Shakespeare, Auden, Tranströmer, MacNeice, Mary Shelley, Neruda, Blake and Rossetti and the music by Bach after Marcello, Grieg, Nielsen, Brahms and Mozart. It took place on Sunday 23 June 2019 at 7.30 pm at the Kempe Studio at The Muses, 58 Waterside, Stratford-upon-Avon, in aid of the Rudolf Kempe Society International Young Artists Platform.

Performers

• The Zephyr Ensemble, Guildhall School of Music – RKS Young Artists 2019
  • Enlli Parri – flute (joining the group for the Nielsen quintet)
  • Roxana Seddon – oboe
  • Isha Crichlow – clarinet
  • Zachary Hayward – horn (the old web text named Millie Lihoreau; the poster and the programme booklet both name Zachary Hayward)
  • Rubi Collins – bassoon
• Ruth Lass – recitation. Trained at RADA; at the time of the concert she was playing Silvia de Zingaro in Robin French’s Crooked Dances for the RSC at The Other Place, after the Equus tour; her favourite roles include Ariel in The Tempest (Barbican), Cosima Wagner in the opera Wagner Dream, and work at the Royal Court, the National Theatre and Shakespeare’s Globe.
• Anthony Negus – piano. Conductor and Music Director of Longborough Festival Opera since 2000. He studied clarinet and piano at the Royal College of Music and music at Oxford, and worked as a music assistant in Wuppertal, Hamburg and Bayreuth – where, as a young man in the 1960s, he watched Rudolf Kempe conduct – before joining Welsh National Opera. He is celebrated in Wagner (a Longborough Ring in 2013, Tristan und Isolde, and the Wagner Society’s Sir Reginald Goodall Memorial Award in 2017) and won Melbourne’s Green Room Award in 2019 for Tristan und Isolde.
• Zubin Varla – piano and recitation; RKS Artist in Residence 2019. Actor and pianist, trained at the Guildhall School; his stage work runs from the RSC (Romeo, Caliban, Brutus) and the National Theatre to an Olivier-nominated Bruce in Fun Home at the Young Vic and Martin Dysart in Equus. He was appointed Artist in Residence to mark 25 years of word and music programmes and chamber music with Cordula Kempe and her Bergonzi Quartet.

Programme

Part I

• Introduction
• J. S. Bach – Adagio from the Concerto in D minor, BWV 974, after Alessandro Marcello’s Oboe Concerto (piano solo)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley – from On Love: “What is love?”
• Walt Whitman – from the Preface to Leaves of Grass: “And this is what you shall do”
• William Shakespeare – Sonnet 116
• Edvard Grieg – Poetic Tone Pictures, Op. 3 No. 1
• Tomas Tranströmer – An Artist in the North: “I, Edvard Grieg”
• Edvard Grieg – Poetic Tone Pictures, Op. 3 No. 2
• Tomas Tranströmer – An Artist in the North: “The year before I die”
• Edvard Grieg – Poetic Tone Pictures, Op. 3 No. 4
• Tomas Tranströmer – The Nightingale in Badelunda
• Louis MacNeice – The Sunlight on the Garden
• Walt Whitman – Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances
• Carl Nielsen – Wind Quintet, Op. 43: I. Allegro ben moderato
• Walt Whitman – I Believe in You My Soul
• Carl Nielsen – Wind Quintet, Op. 43: II. Menuetto
• Walt Whitman – Of Myself
• Carl Nielsen – Wind Quintet, Op. 43: III. Praeludium (Adagio) – Tema con variazioni (Un poco andantino)

Interval

Part II

• William Shakespeare – Sonnet 65
• Johannes Brahms – Intermezzo, Op. 118 No. 2: Andante teneramente
• Mary Shelley – Oh, Listen While I Sing to Thee
• W. H. Auden – If I Could Tell You
• Pablo Neruda – Your Laugh
• William Blake – Doors
• W. A. Mozart – Quintet in E flat major for piano and winds, K 452: I. Largo – Allegro moderato; II. Larghetto; III. Rondo – Allegretto
• Christina Rossetti – Remember

About the programme

Dame Judi Dench welcomed an evening that brought together distinguished artists and young professionals “in memory of Rudolf Kempe and to remind us of what he stood for”.

The booklet’s illustrations told Kempe’s own story through wind and chamber music: the young “Rudi” at 18 as principal oboist of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and member of its wind quintet; the piano gradually taking over; the Kempe Trio with Fritz Kiskalt, solo cellist of the Munich Philharmonic, in a Zurich concert of 1974; and Kempe’s remark that he loved “sitting down at my own instrument and play, rather than chop the air into bits in front of my musicians’ noses”. A page on Bayreuth in the 1960s recalled that Kempe, pigeon-holed as a Wagner specialist, found everything “too loud most of the time” but was loved by singers because he never drowned them – a lesson Anthony Negus, then a young conductor in the Bayreuth pit, carried to Longborough. Mozart’s letter to his father of 10 April 1784 was printed beside the autograph of the Quintet K 452, which he called “the best work I have ever composed”, and Hazell Hills’s poem Roundelay was printed in full.

“Rudolf Kempe remembered” gathered tributes from Edward Greenfield, Robert Ponsonby, Susan Milan (principal flute of the RPO), Dame Janet Baker (“He opened doors. This was music-making of joy.”), Sir John Tooley of the Royal Opera House and Sir Colin Davis (“He was a great teacher.”).

Credits

• Poetry and music chosen by Zubin Varla, RKS Artist in Residence 2019
• Publicity, printing and archive recording: Max Ross
• Dame Judi Dench, Patron; Richard Pearce, Chairman of the Society