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Land of Hope and Glory needs proper vibrato (The Times)

Monday, 4th August 2008

I have a piece in today's Times, on Sir Edward Elgar and vibrato. Here it is:

Romantic that I am, I bought my wife some roses last week. They're now all dead. They still have the look of roses - the stems, the thorns and even the petals. But the petals are shrivelled up and the stems dried out.

I wonder if Sir Roger Norrington, who is to conduct the Last Night of the Proms, has any flowers at home. I do hope not. Because if Sir Roger's approach to flowers matches his approach to music, the ambience in his home will be devoid of any joy.

Let me explain. Sir Roger will conduct Sir Edward Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No 1, also known as Land of Hope and Glory. Or rather, he is to conduct his own version of it. Because he will ask the orchestra to play it without vibrato - the technique whereby violinists add colour to a note by gently vibrating the finger holding down the string.

That's where my wife's roses come in. Elgar without vibrato is the musical equivalent of dead roses. It's like an omelette without yolks.

Sir Roger says he wants to “play one of Britain's most patriotic pieces as its composer intended”. Last week he showed what this meant in a Proms performance with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra of Elgar's First Symphony. To hear the orchestra's vibrato-less performance was to hear it with the soul ripped out. As Professor Raymond Cohen, of the Royal College of Music, put it: “Norrington calls this a ‘fresh' approach to music, but you can call anything ‘fresh' and it is still disgusting. If Elgar heard that performance, he would have turned in his grave.”

That's not just an assertion. We can only speculate about the sound of Beethoven's orchestras, but we have Elgar's recordings of his music to listen to, and the vibrato in those is positively intense. There is nothing historically aware in Sir Roger's version of orchestral sound, just a man with a bizarre fixation ruining the music he conducts. Sir Roger is a pioneering musician who has done wonders to bring about a new understanding of historic performance techniques. He was the first to record a cycle of Beethoven's symphonies played as they would have been performed in Beethoven's time. But like so many pioneers, Sir Roger has started taking his argument too far. Not only is he now a laughing stock; he is doing a disservice to the composer he is conducting.

Why does this matter? Sir Edward Elgar is, I would argue, the greatest of all British composers. His music is already labelled by some as “imperialist” and “jingoist”, which reveals only the ignorance of those making the accusation. But far, far worse than that would be if those listening to Sir Roger's screeching, unmusical performances thought they were listening to Elgar. That would be to dance on Elgar's grave.

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Chris M

August 4th, 2008 10:15am

If we can count him as British, Vaughan Williams was the greatest composer. I never ever tire of his music - and there is nothing which paints sound pictures of this country and how I feel about this country than Vaughan Williams' Pastoral Symphony or The Lark Ascending

Raymond Cohen

August 4th, 2008 12:51pm

I was overjoyed to read your article in the Times and the blog. However I want to point out that vibrato was used in Beethoven's time.
If Norrington was aware of the writings in the 16c of Agricola, of Mersenne (1636) or North (1695) and Leopold Mozart (1756) he would learn that they discussed vibrato and its use.
It must therefore have been an essential part of performing at that time and ever since.

ACT

August 4th, 2008 3:43pm

I really didn't realise you were quite so thin-skinned. What on earth have you taken offence about? My asking whether you'll be churning out your inevitable annual anti-Last Night piece later this summer? For goodness sake, you've made light of your single transferrable column habits yourself in the past. Lighten up, you'll live longer etc etc.

Stephen Pollard

August 4th, 2008 6:03pm

ACT - Eh? I haven't taken offence at anything. Not sure what you're on about!

ACT

August 5th, 2008 12:12pm

Thanks Stephen, it did seem fairly uncharacteristic. My (almost) apologies therefore: my first, markedly more light-hearted post never appeared, hence the 2nd one. I quite appreciate that the seemingly (albeit, inexcusably) lousy Spectator software might well have 'lost' it. But that still leaves the questions of the crypto-unhuman who stuck up the 2nd one unredacted. When 2nd posts are plainly alluding to 'vanished/never arrived, but v much sent' earlier ones, to put them up as sent in (unknowing of the fate of the first one) does minor injury to poster and subsequent reader alike.

Raymond Ovens

August 12th, 2008 5:58pm

Vibrato is the personalizing of a musical sound. Without it you have a dead, soulless noise which is not worth listening to. As a retired professional violinist I remember my career started in the LSO 1952. We were alwaysbeing accused of having a cold uniteresting string sound. Why can't they emulate the richness of the Vienna Philharmonic, or Berlin orchestra's.
Then came this crase for 'authentic' performance. In the Boyd Neel orchestra we even went as far as having baroque bows supplied, which decreased our sound by at least 50%!
Sir Thomas Beecham famously described the Harpsichord as sounding like skeletons crossing a roof. A violin without vibrato also comes into this category!

henryflower

August 16th, 2008 11:47am

In my opinion Elgar is a thoroughly Germanic composer whose music is now unhappily and unfairly encrusted with images of British statehood and pomp. Take away those associations and the images of the "heave-ho!" buffoons who make the Proms so painful, and there is little in his actual music that is genuinely British in character.

Ironically, RVW, who studied abroad with Ravel, produced a body of work that is much more characteristically British: bucolic, pastoral, an occasional nod towards the city, embarrassingly forced attempts at angst and violence now and then, before retreating back into a quasi-mysticism that masks a basic sentimentality. Oh, and amateurishness of course - by which I mean that very British quality of doing enough to convey the intended emotion without worrying too greatly about the formal or technical perfection of the piece, a British quality that lives on in the work of someone like James MacMillan - whose recent St John Passion sounded very much like a Vaughan Williams pastiche with modern knobs on.