Kempe had not conducted the Alpine Symphony before and a Royal Festival Hall performance (in April 1966) preceded the recording which, after prodigious booking efforts to secure the extra number of brass players needed, was made in a very short time (and in normal working hours) at London’s Kingsway Hall. The sessions are particularly well remembered by conductor Elgar Howarth who had recently, and rather reluctantly, become the RPO’s first trumpet (“it meant that I would have to practice!”) – and was immediately faced with “one of the real frighteners in the repertoire, with high, loud and difficult solos, especially that chromatically slippy passage in On the glacier”. However, the only real problem that Howarth recalls in the sessions for the Alpine Symphony was keeping the organ in tune. The horn player Alan Civil (1929-89) was famously cynical about many conductors. On his stand he would keep a complete pocket score of the work he was rehearsing – and was known to make musical points from it to conductors he felt were lacking in talent or detail. Rudolf Kempe, however, was one of the conductors (along with Beecham, Karajan and Klemperer) that Civil especially admired. Indeed, when Kempe moved in 1975 from the RPO to the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Civil thought it would be the start of a golden age for the orchestra, an important antidote to the modern, what he sometimes called ‘contemptible’ music which the orchestra regularly programmed in the Glock era. When Kempe died in early 1976 Civil was immensely disappointed. Civil had been one of the two most famous pupils of the legendary Royal Academy of Music horn professor Aubrey Brain, father of the equally legendary Dennis Brain, alongside whom he played in wartime military bands, and the early days of Beecham’s RPO and the Philharmonia. By universal approval, Civil moved up from third horn to inherit Dennis Brain’s principal chair at the Philharmonia’s recording sessions for Strauss’s Capriccio after Brain was tragically killed on 1 September 1957. “I don’t use the word great very often,” says horn player, conductor and professor Michael Thompson, “but Alan Civil was a great horn player.” Excerpt from the note, © Mike Ashman, 2008
