Everyone else is busy writing about Elgar now. His birthday isn't until next weekend, but here's conductor Sakari Oramo in The Guardian with a ream of good sense. What Elgar needs, he insists, is foreign champions. Dead right. With the same peculiar nationalist whateveritis that insists you have to be Russian to play Rachmaninov, English musicians have tended to prevail in Elgar - whose fault? Promoters? Record companies? Elgar's perceived 'Englishness'? Sakari says something I've been saying for a while, which is that Elgar's music is not particularly English: his principal influences are Strauss, Schumann and Wagner.
Michael Kennedy takes the Englishness line in a different direction in The Telegraph, but I guess he/they would. He begins with 'Windflower', Alice Stuart Wortley, talking about Elgar coming from the heart and soul of England etc etc.
Oh lordy, and The Times says we're wrong to downplay his love of Empire. That's all he needs... but at least they are offering free downloads (only short ones, mind).
Pay your money and take your choice. Or alternatively have a look at my angle on the matter in my archive.
Tasmin Little is going off to the Far East and Australia next week to tour the Elgar Violin Concerto around Kuala Lumpur, Perth, Adelaide and, appropriately enough, Tasmania (which is what will take over Launceston and Hobart when they hear her play!). Meanwhile I missed Philippe Graffin's performance of the piece in its pre-Kreislerised version in Liverpool with the RLPO and Tod Handley on Thursday night. I had to give about a talk about Schumann and Brahms down the road in Manchester at the same time - this went well, by the way. It was in the Bridgewater Hall, one of my favourite venues, combining good modern design, excellent acoustics and a relatively intimate atmosphere. My fellow Indy journalist Lynne Walker and I discussed the cross-currents between the composers and persuaded the resident CD player to cooperate with illustrations now and then.
I'm still overwhelmed with relief when I walk on to a concert platform and find that I do not have to play a piano.
2 comments:
I would disagree with maestro Oramo on several details. My "desert island" disc is the Solti version of the 1st Symphony - I have been playing it for 30 years - and his restless nervous energy makes him exactly right for the work . It is also a feature of the composer's recordings of his work so I cannot agree that Elgar was not a somewhat troubled genius - all the best biographers are agreed on this. I can't agree that Elgar is "sinking into oblivion abroad": he has always been neglected, especially in the Latin countries, with the exception of the "Enigma Variations". I would say he is more accessible to a foreign musician, because more central, than Bartok but he also very English: almost despite myself, I see in my mind's eye my grandparents' garden in Sussex whenever I hear his works.
In spite of an intellectual appreciaton of the Wagner/Strauss influence in Elgar's mucic my own Elgar-England link was forged when I was about fourteen or so. The good old BBC Home Service dramatised "Man of Property" and used the "WN" variation as the introduction. It seemed such a natural juxtaposition of music and drama.
In that era the BBC programmes introduced me to so much varied music associated with their serialized dramas, many on Children's Hour. I wonder if your more mature readers have a similar memories of the incidental music chosen for the old radio and TV programmes.
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