Elgar 29 Jul - 2 Aug

[silvestrione]

RVW is Britains greatest symphonist

I think I'd agree (though Elgar 2 is the greatest British symphony )

[ucanseetheend]

I'll try to remember that next time I play one of my many recordings of Elgar's 1st! (note the apostrophe)

Yes, test that little bit of grey matter in your skull.

[Master Jacques]

When people write "greatest" I invariably mentally substitute "my personal favourite", to avoid fruitless debate. (For me at this moment that's Rubbra's 8th, but I would be surprised if it wasn't something else at the same time tomorrow).

Back on topic, I notice that the presenter referred to Elgar's Cockaigne overture after the performance simply as "Elgar's overture In London Town". Does this represent a fear that voicing the piece's familiar name might be taken as the BBC supporting illegal drug use? In any case, DM ought to have given us the full title, rather than cherry-picking the bracketed bit. A tiny slice of unwanted social engineering, perhaps? More importantly, it was a cracking performance!

[smittims]

A friend of the composer said 'I thought cocaine was supposed to send you to sleep. Why not call it chloroform?'

'Ether will do', replied Elgar without a moment's hesitation.

[gradus]

When people write "greatest" I invariably mentally substitute "my personal favourite", to avoid fruitless debate. (For me at this moment that's Rubbra's 8th, but I would be surprised if it wasn't something else at the same time tomorrow).

Back on topic, I notice that the presenter referred to Elgar's Cockaigne overture after the performance simply as "Elgar's overture In London Town". Does this represent a fear that voicing the piece's familiar name might be taken as the BBC supporting illegal drug use? In any case, DM ought to have given us the full title, rather than cherry-picking the bracketed bit. A tiny slice of unwanted social engineering, perhaps? More importantly, it was a cracking performance!

Indeed it was a cracking performance by Sakari Oramo and a Swedish Orchestra absolutely on point, gloriously performed.

[Pulcinella]

When people write "greatest" I invariably mentally substitute "my personal favourite", to avoid fruitless debate. (For me at this moment that's Rubbra's 8th, but I would be surprised if it wasn't something else at the same time tomorrow).

Back on topic, I notice that the presenter referred to Elgar's Cockaigne overture after the performance simply as "Elgar's overture In London Town". Does this represent a fear that voicing the piece's familiar name might be taken as the BBC supporting illegal drug use? In any case, DM ought to have given us the full title, rather than cherry-picking the bracketed bit. A tiny slice of unwanted social engineering, perhaps? More importantly, it was a cracking performance!

Staying off topic, I've mentioned previously that I was at the Liverpool premiere of Rubbra's 8th and the Oxford Sheldonian repeat a short while later. It impressed me then (though subsequently listening to that premiere it was a bit ropey!) and still does.

[LMcD]

Yes, test that little bit of grey matter in your skull.

Ever so slightly ad hominem?

[Master Jacques]

Staying off topic, I've mentioned previously that I was at the Liverpool premiere of Rubbra's 8th and the Oxford Sheldonian repeat a short while later. It impressed me then (though subsequently listening to that premiere it was a bit ropey!) and still does.

You did mention it, Pulcinella. I was also there, a teenager making my first visit to Liverpool; and I've got quite used now to that wonky cello solo late on in the performance. We all have off nights, but that was a weird one from the RLPO first cello. No matter, it was a privilege to be there for the birth of a great symphony.

[smittims]

I heard it on Radio 3. I was uncertain about the work until Norman del Mar's splendid Lyrita LP came out.

[LMcD]

I heard it on Radio 3. I was uncertain about the work until Norman del Mar's splendid Lyrita LP came out.

Fine though Rubbra's 8th is, I think the 6th is even finer. The Lyrita recording also includes another fine work, the 'Soliloquy'.

[smittims]

Yes, I agree, the sixth and seventh are his best in my view.

Listening to the last Elgar programme, I was reminded of why I stopped hearing this slot regularly. I may be what Sir Thomas Beecham called 'one of those pernickety so-and-so's' but I can't help being irked by inaccuracies. Our old friend Donald seemed to confuse the recording session of the Nursery Suite in Kingsway hall , at which royalty were present, with the official opening of Abbey Road studio one , where the guests were no more eminent than Landon Ronald (the dedicatee of Falstaff, which was recorded then) and George Bernard Shaw.

[Serial_Apologist]

I know the Cello Concerto too well in my head to find it possible any more to listen to a previously unheard one, such as this with Isserlis, in detailed attention. What is it about Elgar's music I find inescapable, despite thinking of myself as a committed modernist. But am I? My modernist sympathies are more with the first half of the 20th century in not just music, I have to admit, although I remain an unashamed apologist for the 1960s as arguably the last blossoming of the spirit which produced the early paintings of Matisse, Picasso and Kandinsky. More than one person has argued that what seemed radical and qualitatively breaking from the past in a good deal of not just the painting, sculpture and music of the breakthrough years (approx 1907 to 1924) can with the benefit of acquired familiarity reveal indissoluble links with what went before, even if such continuities sometimes only reveal themselves in small details, such as the areas of relative release to be found in almost all Schoenberg's 12-tone works, and even in Webern's, albeit not so obviously as in Berg's. With that sort of sentiment one looks back on other harbingers of 20th century innovation with an anticipatory ear to where, for instance, the music of the great composer of Beethoven's last string quartets might have gone had he had the benefits of minimally comfortable 20th century living and health care. OK some wisecrack will say he wouldn't have written such music, and I am being "un-Marxist". But, leaving aside Elgar's bourgeois circumstances, and those of other non-British contemporaries with whom he could profitably be compared or aligned to, such as Reger, Schmidt, Pfitzner, Medtner, Fauré, Rachmaninov, one can listen to the last movement of Elgar's Violin Sonata, which I did for the first time just now, and, along with any work by the latter five 19th century aesthetic hangover composers thinking, could any of this music have been composed other than in the 20th century? I am edging towards what I think Schoenberg might have meant in saying that there was still much music to be written using the diatonic system. It had stretched him beyond itself and he later went back to re-invest its possibilities with what atonality and pitch juxtaposition could do for its enrichment, and even erstwhile sympathetic contemporaries like Strauss, Schmidt, Pfitzner, Zemlinsky especially, and, yes, Elgar too, were at some level of common awareness conscious of the inescapability of the incipient implications of what Schoenberg and his immediate circle creatively deduced in the output of their most idiomatically forward-thinking predecessors, from Beethoven through to Mahler and Debussy. Modernity in the large confronted them all with creative choices which they could either seize hold on or deny.

[Quarky]

Thanks S_A, I read your post with interest, and it has inspired me to read again "The Rest is Noise", which represents my limit of knowledge of 20th Century music.

However I currently feel somewhat dubious that serialism is absolutely vital to the greater part of "Contemporary" music of the 20th and 21st Centuries.

[Serial_Apologist]

Thanks S_A, I read your post with interest, and it has inspired me to read again "The Rest is Noise", which represents my limit of knowledge of 20th Century music.

However I currently feel somewhat dubious that serialism is absolutely vital to the greater part of "Contemporary" music of the 20th and 21st Centuries.

I think it's worth mentioning that twelve-tone "themes" had already appeared in pre-Schoenberg composers, including Liszt, and that AS himself arrived at his 12-tone method from a period of tightening up on material and the structural forms he inherited from Bach and especially the late Beethoven of the quartets. In combination with foreshortening harmonic procedures, making the chromatic harmonic progressions taking Wagner's way of moving from chord to chord through "passing notes" be a basis for re-introducing contrapuntal procedures and uniting the "vertical" (chords and horizontal (polyphony/counterpoint)), even before the full abandonment of tonality, in works such as the one-movement String Quartet of 1905 and Kammersymphonie of 1906. By excluding or at any rate minimising the range of pitches in a given sequence he found that his melodic ideas tended towards including all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale with only minimal repetition of any one pitch until all 12 had been stated. This resulted in melodic statements in which the accompanying parts, thematically related and interwoven with the main melody part, could fulfil Wagner's ideal of "unending melody" in condensed form. At the same time the naturally wide pitch range resulting from the emotionally charged character of melodic invention in the hands of Strauss and Mahler (among others) could yield ways of varying the melodic shape without corrupting its integrity by, for example, interval inversion (changing a step from a major second to a minor seventh, or a major fourth to a major fifth) and octave displacement (placing the next note in a different octave). In this way the "Gestalt" or shape remains consistent. Given the loss of habitual expectation a given sequence could be inverted, as Bach and other Baroque and Baroque-influenced composers had done from the 17th century on, or even reversed or reverse-inverted.

All these innovations had been initiated "spontaneously" and were only appreciated as such by AS in hindsight, thus undermining the contention of some of the method's critics that it amounted to an artificial and even authoritarian imposition of restrictions on musical inspiration and freedom. It could be valid to argue that given that the twelve-tone serial method could have only come out of the language of the Austro-German tradition as progressed by Wagner, Wolf, Mahler and Reger in particular, it therefore had no natural place in musical lineages external to it. But by the time Schoenberg and his immediate circle arrived at the method the aesthetic that had carried them to that point had in any case changed, ditching its dependence on extra-musical factors (poetic, psychic, psychological) brought in to substitute for the weakening pull of key and the forms depending on it, and returning to the Baroque and Classical ideals of formal symmetry and maximal deployment of given materials to expressive and constructive ends - in other words an acknowledgement of giving rein to the natural human capacity for formalisation.

Once this was established it enabled composers outwith the tradition such as Dallapiccola in Italy and Elisabeth Lutyens in Britain to use serialism as a universal organising principle: many composers who had been moving towards or embracing atonality from other directions saw the method as a way of getting away from habitual ways of thinking music that had become clichéd and restricting. After WW2 a new generation of serialists led by Boulez asked themselves why restrict serial organisation to pitches? why not do the same for durations, dynamics and so on? The possibilities for extension were potentially limitless. They also regarded Schoenberg as having failed to follow through the full implications of abandoning tonality by virtue of his having returned to using forms (variation, sonata, closed) that had depended on key relationships and contrasts. But Schoenberg had never thought of himself as abandoning the tradition he had taken fully on board, which he felt he was extending according to its own possibilities.

[smittims]

Hi, S-A, you might be interested in JPE Harper Scott's book 'Elgar, a modernist composer' (Cambridge 2010). I haven't read it, though I was most interested to read your posts above .

On could, of course, say 'it depends what you mean by 'modernism'. Parry was acclaimed as a 'modernist ' in the 1880s when his Prometheus Unbound was first performed, and while Elgar's musical language didn't keep pace with the rapid advances of Schoenberg and Stravinsky in the early 20th century, there are passages in the two big oratorios, the secoind symphony and Falstaff which would have sounded very modern to their first audiences .