Rattle conducts Elgar

[cloughie]

For me, the finer of the two Elgar completed.

As always a matter of opinion and choice - love them both to bits but 1 a little bit more!

[Barbirollians]

As always a matter of opinion and choice - love them both to bits but 1 a little bit more!

Very much hearing the ghost of Barbirolli in this terrific performance by LSO/Rattle of Elgar 2.

[gradus]

Very much hearing the ghost of Barbirolli in this terrific performance by LSO/Rattle of Elgar 2.

2 tips it - just - for me, it's the woodwind/harp passages in the scherzo and the last movement that get me every time.

[LHC]

Like his finales, discussions on Bruckner go on forever!

Will we be getting an equally good LSO Rattle Elgar 1. I hope so!

It's not in the schedule for the second half of his final season as Music Director which has just been announced, so it appears not (or at least not immediately). Although, as he will retain the title of Conductor Emeritus for life, we can hope he will return to the LSO in a future season and give us his Elgar 1.

[silvestrione]

The last movement has now appeared on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqi6Ec0M6P0

Rattle conducting without a score despite, as far as I'm aware, never having conducted it before (certainly not recently?), and clearly much moved by the stupendous conclusion, as we all are.

[Lordgeous]

As always a matter of opinion and choice - love them both to bits but 1 a little bit more!

My thoughts exactly!

[smittims]

Another fine Elgar 2 last night from Mark Wigglesworth and the BBC Philharmonic in Radio3 in concert. Listening to the same orchestra in the same symphony in a recording from eleven years ago under Vasily Sinaisky, I wondered (no disrespect to these two fine musicians) if Elgar 2 is now 'easy',a work the BBC Philharmonic could almost play without a conductor.

Fantasy of course. Yet I remember one trenchant poster on the old board insisting that any good performance was to the credit of the orchestra not the conductor. Does anyone remember the edition of 'Andre Previn's Music Night' where he let the LSO continue and finish the first movement exposition of Beethoven 's Fifth without him? I recall the Vienna Philharmonic giving a competent if not illuminating Mozart G minor (K550) at the Proms under a guest conductor unkown to me but apparently a famous comedian in America, and wondering if they were looking at him at all, and listening to James Levine's set of Mozart Symphonies with the same orchestra on DG I've occasionally wondered if it would sound much different had he not been there. I heard they voted for him to conduct this set and wondered then of they did so because he was a genial fellow who would't interfere too much with the way they played . De mortuis nil nisi bonum, of course, and I've never found fault with his conducting.

Listening carefully, however, to any performance, I'm inclined to think that it's the little details that make the difference between good and outstanding, especially when one says 'I never realised that before about this work', whether it's an unfamiliar piece he had to teach them (Tod Handley in Bax's 4th) or a new look at an old warhorse (Silvestri and the Philharmonia in Tchaik 5 in 1957, a recording that made me sit up, even after Herbert) .

Please forgive this ramble. I'm off down the 'Pool now to see if I can get my umbrella back I think I left there some weeks ago.

[Sir Velo]

I remember one trenchant poster on the old board insisting that any good performance was to the credit of the orchestra not the conductor.

If we're thinking of someone whose sobriquet was that of a sculptor of somewhat salacious reputation, I seem to recall they used to hold the same view for every piece of music!