Paul van Kempen won a kind of phonographic immortality when he conducted for Kempff in his early 1950s DG Berlin cycle of the Beethoven piano concertos. Nothing there, though, would prepare one for the account of the Eroica Symphony van Kempen recorded with the BPO at much the same time. This is big-boned Beethoven, steadily paced, trenchant and direct, occasionally verging on the melodramatic. It is self-evidently the work of a conductor born and brought up in an age that lionized not only Beethoven himself but the whole business of Beethoven interpretation.
Unfortunately, van Kempen began his conducting career too late (aged 39 when he left the first violin section of Mengelberg's Concertgebouw Orchestra) and died too soon (in 1955, aged 62) ever properly to develop his art or establish himself as a known name on the international scene. He also had the misfortune to begin his conducting career in Germany in 1932. After holding posts in Dresden and Aachen (where he replaced Karajan in 1942) his career underwent an unfortunate hiatus in the years immediately following 1945 when he was persona non grata with the Dutch authorities.
Trenchant as the Eroica is—and the overture The Consecration of the House, full of Flemish rumbustiousness—it has to be said that on the second disc both the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies are really inclined to sit on their hands. In neither work (nor, for that matter, in the Eroica) do you sense that van Kempen has either the time or the will to question received Central European opinion on Beethoven texts or interpretation.
The Philips booklet tells us little about van Kempen that isn't in the (rather shorter) entry in Grove. It also somewhat eccentrically attributes the recording of the Eroica to 1959, four years after van Kempen's death. The recording of the Eroica is big, brazen and rather reverberant; the others conform more nearly to the sound-quality of the slightly better-than-average early mono Long Playing record.'