Elgar: Symphonies Nos 1 and 2

[salymap]

What a wonderful thread. I haven't read it all but the last few posts with the Malvern Hills, the BBCSO recording of Elgar 2 by Sargent that I have forgotten and must look for, and lastly that open fronted shop in Newport Court, near all my music jobs. I spent many happy lunch times looking through the LPs in that shop Stanley. I must sort my CDs, I have more than I realised.

[Stanley Stewart]

Greetings, Saly! Can I prompt your memory about Newport Court. The shop on the left was laterally owned by Steve Miller,from late 70s/early 80s, but I seem to recall it from my early days in London, late 50s, as Collector's Corner (?) owned by a most knowledgeable man, Colin and his partner. He'd been a professional singer as a younger man and the shop was full of 78rpm treasures as well as LPs. The lighter fare, Broadway musicals - I got my first recording of Bernstein "Candide" for £1, a bargain price for an import vinyl - but all this was always confined to the outside wooden bins with other titles of dubious taste! He had a neurotic disposition, a born worrier, and literally fluttered his hands when I handed over a Scott Walker LP for purchase. The last straw which prompted his retirement was the sounds of rock music from the much smaller shop, opposite, owned by a Mrs Miller - Steve Miller's mother. So the sound of, say, Mick Jagger's voice used to disturb Colin who proclaimed to all and sundry that he'd been a singer and the sound of rock, unfettered, hour after hour, gave him a sore throat. His protests were always so heartfelt. Ironic that his shop was eventually bought by Steve Miller who went out of his way to handsomely provide for the classical collector, in the early years of the CD. I got all of the Decca/Mackerras Janacek recordings from him and I still prize the Michael Scott, 2 vol, Record of Singing hardbacks for a tenner. And, to get back on thread, gan schnell, my Elgar collection expanded over the next ten years, including the Elgar & His Publishers, 2 vol set, and the Elgar-Atkins Friendship, much appreciated when coping with a mortgage for a flat in London. Tut,tut! Yuppies in the 80s and a new phrase at the time, 'upwardly mobile', too. Well, you gotta laugh!

[ahinton]

Here's the thing - Payne did a wonderful job constructing a performable work, but it's not a symphony by Elgar. Nowhere near it. Elgar completed so little that was in an understandable form (the exposition of the first movement in short score, and little else) and his previous finished works are usually unguessable from from surviving sketches.

"Nowhere near it"? How and on what specific grounds do you seek to judge this? OK, it ought not to be and, technically, it isn't and cannot be (as Tony Payne would still, I'm, sure, be the first to admit), yet it's so remarkably and uncomfortably close to what that symphony might have been that it's difficult not to see and hear it as what most listeners now do, namely "Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Op. 88: Elgar"; Payne's achievement with it is something so very far beyond the merely scholastic and so far outside what anyone might have expected a composer steeped in Elgar to be able to achieve that it stands, it seems to me, as a testament to something sufficiently well above the kind of "x arranges and completes y's incomplete work" as to make us all pause for thought and wonder how on earth he go inside the final months of Elgar's creative impetus to enable him to do what he's done with this material.

I'm glad we have the Elgar-Payne, but perhaps I shouldn't be - after all, the composer had asked for it to be burned.

I think that most of us are more than glad about this but let us not forget that Elgar said lots of conflicting things during his final months about what he apparently felt that the fate of the work should be - not just that its score should be burned.

[akiralx]

I'll lob in another name who I have enjoyed on CD conducting Sym 1: Jeffrey Tate (with the LSO on EMI). Very red-blooded performance.

[JFLL]

I resisted commenting on this for a while but think that there are some interesting things here .........

I think the answer to Saly is YES and more so

there's little in the SOUND of Elgar (and the Symphonies are great works) that is intrinsically about that specific landscape IMV rather that it's what we imagine the landscape to be sonically in imagination.
If one played them to someone without all the stuff about bikes and Malvern etc etc and then showed images of different places I think they wouldn't necessarily match up.

I guess if one thinks of the place as being about people in a particular time then it kind of works
but compared to pieces that use the actuality of place (Chris Watson's Weather Report for example) the connection is , I think, more wishful thinking than real

it's great music nonetheless .....

Isn’t it also that Elgar himself had a very strong sense of place, and in particular was clearly deeply inspired as a composer by certain places (and people, too, perhaps), to judge from his recorded remarks, so that, if we believe he was sincere, we read into his music the ‘spirit’ of the places he was inspired by (Longdon Marsh, for example – he said that ‘he had to go there more than once to think out those climaxes in the Ascension’ [in The Apostles]), and conversely we read into those places the spirit of his music? This is all very intangible, in that both landscape (perceived aesthetically as opposed to mere topography), and music as experienced and understood (as opposed to mere sounds), are mental phenomena, so that an element of ‘wishful thinking’ (seeing what’s ‘not really there’?) is perhaps inevitable. I don’t know Chris Watson's Weather Report, and would be interested to know how he uses the ‘actuality’ of place in a different way from, say, Elgar.

[MrGongGong]

I don’t know Chris Watson's Weather Report, and would be interested to know how he uses the ‘actuality’ of place in a different way from, say, Elgar.

it's composed from recordings of actual locations

A few years ago I had a chat with Max about one of his string quartets
he described how the music to him was very specific to particular walks on the beach
sometimes to do with specific weather or times of day
BUT that this was more a model for him to use to write rather than something that
an audience needed to know about

[Mr Pee]

it's composed from recordings of actual locations

Not sure what you mean by that. Recordings of the sounds of particular places? Which would not be music as most of us understand it. Obviously if I stood in Trafalgar Square, and recorded the sounds, that would be Trafalgar Square. But it would be more of a news report than a piece of music.

Music can capture the essence of a location,and echo the subconcious feelings that it brings to us. That is what Elgar did, I believe. If he had stood in Malvern High Street and simply recorded the sound, I don't think we'd still be talking about him today, although it might be an interesting historical document.

[MrGongGong]

Not sure what you mean by that. Recordings of the sounds of particular places?

it means that , you know like the nightingale in The Pines of Rome

Music can capture the essence of a location

Hummmm not sure about that (and by that I mean i'm NOT sure)
it can capture a particular persons impressions but whether that's the "essence" as opposed to what people think is the "essence" is another thing.

[Op. XXXIX]

We had a wonderful honeymoon in a hotel at the foot of the Malvern Hills, close to St Anne's Fountain.

There is also a terrific pub on Church Street near the Elgar statue. The previous day I had climbed up the Malvern Hills, and was sweating so badly, midway I had to strip down to my tee shirt!

All good clean fun I suppose, but honestly I have never heard the great man's music in the air when alighting the train at Worcester Foregate. Continuing on to Hereford -and what glorious scenery!- I had to ask myself, you ARE hearing Elgar aren't you?

Actually not, it was 'Ireland in F'. That was going to be the setting at Hereford Cathedral for Evensong.

[salymap]

I first visited the Elgar Birthplace, only a few miles from the Hills, in 1954, before it was comercialised and when the only 'member of staff' was an elderly lady who had known Elgar and the family. Carice visited once while we there [NO, I didn't speak to her ] and the rose bushes in the garden were given or planted with the names of the Friends in the Enigma's. Combined with everything else in Worcester and the Three Choirs' Festivsl that we attended, how could the place and Hills NOT be full of hs music.

[Op. XXXIX]

Combined with everything else in Worcester and the Three Choirs' Festival that we attended, how could the place and Hills NOT be full of his music.

, back in 2006 I decided to walk from Great Malvern to Little Malvern to visit Elgar's grave at St. Wulstan's RC.

Within a few minutes the skies opened up -oh why didn't I take the bus?- and the rains came down, even the brolly was useless. I hid under a large tree, but still managed to get utterly soaked. (The price to pay for being an Elgarian?)

But you know what? When I arrived at St. Wulstan's, the sun came out shining, all of a sudden it was warm and glorious! Elgar's grave was a magnificent moment for me.

Needless to say, I took a bus back to Great Malvern, thus avoiding another downpour. Great to have a few beers then.

[ahinton]

Music can capture the essence of a location, and echo the subconcious feelings that it brings to us. That is what Elgar did, I believe. If he had stood in Malvern High Street and simply recorded the sound, I don't think we'd still be talking about him today, although it might be an interesting historical document.

I don't believe that music can or should even be expected to do any such thing; that music can be sparked off by such essences and such subconscious feelings is almost certainly the case but that's quite a different matter. Were one to rely on Elgar's own apparent thoughts on this - those thoughts that came about as a consequence of his personal experiences - then one would have to try to accept that he believed that he "found" certain music in certain places, especially the Malvern Hills; I'm no neuroscientist, let alone a research neuropsychopathogist, but I do find that notion a perfectly credible one, arguably endorsed to some degree by Busoni's image of a composer as a diviner and the conclusions reached independently of one another by Schönberg and Stravinsky that they were the vessels through which music came, suggesting (albeit in different ways) in all cases the notion of music already being in existence in some form and its resource being tapped by composers. It might sound somewhat fanciful, but more credible, I think, than the idea that any music can "capture" what you suggest it being capable of "capturing" for every listener irrespective of his/her background and listening experiences.

Come to think of it, some of the processes that finally brought to life Elgar's Third Symphony (and I'm afraid that I make no apologies for calling it that) may not be light-years away from such considerations. It's interesting to compare it with other such symphonic completions, not least Mahler 10, in terms of the demands made on those undertaking the assembly and completion. Elgar 3 clearly had far less extant material to work with and such as there is was in largely disorganised format, yet I am as struck today as I was at the world première almost 15 years ago that what Anthony Payne has achieved in it is something that somehow transcends even the highest possible reasonable expectations of a highly gifted composer and Elgar scholar such as he is; in other words, the mere combination of profound scholarship, decades of living with all of Elgar's extant music and outstanding composerly ability alone seems to be insufficient to account for the convincing and compelling nature of the finished product.

Payne himself (who is anything but fanciful by nature) told me that, as work progressed on the symphony (and, after all, it didn't for many years because he thought it an impossible task), he almost felt a need to try to "be" Elgar to be able to see it through - surely no mean feat for someone who was born more than two years after Elgar died (and no, this did not involve purchasing a dog and a bicycle and relocating to a cottage near the Worcester Beacon until he reached the work's final double bar).

I would even go so far as to suggest that, in his work on this symphony, Anthony Payne actually achieved successfully something not entirely unakin to the kinds of things that Rosemary Brown had so signally failed to achieve in her purported efforts to bring "Liszt" to us. Colin Matthews, for example - a distinguished composer in his own right whose notable track record of working with the music of other composers amply demonstrates that he knows of what he speaks - has observed that something else seems to have been at work here that cannot obviously be detected in the work of other symphonic completists.

[salymap]

RE #107 from Stanley Stewart. Thanks a lot Stanley for your memories of the shop in Newport Court. I know nothing of that background but visited in from [probably] 1950 to the mid 1970s.

On topic - my CDs are chaotic as I need more storage/shelves, but I know I have that BBCMM Sargent recording of one of the symphonies and also 'Elgar conducting Elgar', which has one of the symphonies.
I must spend some time sorting these. Best wishes

[Hornspieler]

RE #107 from Stanley Stewart. Thanks a lot Stanley for your memories of the shop in Newport Court. I know nothing of that background but visited in from [probably] 1950 to the mid 1970s.

On topic - my CDs are chaotic as I need more storage/shelves, but I know I have that BBCMM Sargent recording of one of the symphonies and also 'Elgar conducting Elgar', which has one of the symphonies.
I must spend some time sorting these. Best wishes

I remember Newprt Court mainly for "West End Misfits" (or was it Wallers?) where we could buy second hand Morning dress (Black Jacket and Pin Stripe Trousers) for daytime concerts and Dinner Jackets and Tail Coats for evening ware.
All clothes were in top condition and the shop was much patronised by pecunious musicians and restaurant staff.

HS

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I first visited the Elgar Birthplace, only a few miles from the Hills, in 1954, before it was comercialised and when the only 'member of staff' was an elderly lady who had known Elgar and the family. .

My first visit was in 1970. I had been canoeing down the River Wye for a week with a friend, and we passed through Worcester on the way home. So we made a diversion, only to find that the Birthpace was closed in the morning. However, Alan Webb invited us inn after my friend had described me as being "nuts about Elgar", and he very kindly showed us around personally - an act of generosity I shall never forget.