Elgar

Thursday

D.J. Taylor

The myth of the outsider

The job of radio critic for the Tablet offers several perquisites. One of them is access to the BBC previews website, and it was by this means, quite some time before its recent broadcast, that I was able to listen to Adrian Chiles’s Radio 4 documentary Finding Elgar. As a veteran of countless BBC radio documentaries and mindful of their sensitivity to the cultural issues of the day, I knew exactly what I would find, and there it was. Elgar, Chiles insisted, was an ‘outsider’ – lower middle class, a Catholic to boot, and marginalised and patronised by ‘the establishment’ until such time as his musical genius began to declare

Thursday

Richard Bratby

A luminous new recording of The Dream of Gerontius

Grade: A– There’s a species of music-lover who enjoys pointing out that Elgar isn’t played much on the Continent – the musical equivalent of those social media bores who pop up each April to reveal that Saint George was Turkish, ackshully. It’s all rot, of course. Some of the best Elgar performances of recent years have come from Barenboim and Petrenko in Berlin; and, after all, it was Richard Strauss in Düsseldorf who put The Dream of Gerontius on the map.  And now here’s Gerontius from Helsinki. True, the conductor, Nicholas Collon, is British and I hadn’t previously had him down as an Elgarian. The choirs are a mixture of

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Baffling and vile: ETO’s Manon Lescaut reviewed

In 1937, John Barbirolli took six pieces by Henry Purcell and arranged them for an orchestra of strings, horns and woodwinds. Nothing unusual about that: arranging baroque music for modern symphony orchestras was what famous conductors used to do. Beecham and Hamilton Harty re-upholstered Handel. Mahler did something similar with Bach, then directed the result from a grand piano, and wouldn’t you give anything to have heard him? All good clean fun in those innocent days before the advent of historically informed performance. ‘Can you tell me what was happening?’ asked a woman on the way out It’s unusual to hear these things revived now, and curiouser still when the

Thursday

Philip Hensher

A dutiful exercise carried out in a rush

Like department stores, empires and encyclopaedias, the multi-volume narrative national history is an invention of the later 18th century. It reaches its apogee, promising to bring everything important within a single enclosure, in the 19th and early 20th century. After that, ambitious examples appear to be fighting against a general lack of enthusiasm. Most of these works are little read now, from David Hume’s 1750s The History of England all the way through to Winston Churchill’s idiosyncratic A History of the English-Speaking Peoples in the 1950s. The grand sweep has a tendency to define the significant in advance. Many of these histories can explain a sequence of legislation, such as

Thursday

Alexandra Coghlan

Where to start with the music of Ethel Smyth

I’m reminded of an old Irish joke. A tourist approaches a local for directions to Dublin. The local, after much teeth-sucking and head-scratching, eventually replies: ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here…’. The news that, 75 years after her death, English composer Ethel Smyth has won a Grammy Award for her last large-scale work The Prison is as excellent as it is unexpected. But it’s also frustrating because, well, if I were setting out into Smyth for the first time, I really wouldn’t start from there. A ‘symphony’ for soprano, bass–baritone, chorus and orchestra, The Prison was the 72-year-old Smyth’s final homage to American philosopher and poet Henry Brewster: librettist, friend,

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Refined and dreamy: CBSO centenary concerts reviewed

For an orchestra to lose one anniversary concert may be regarded as unfortunate. To lose two? Welcome to 2020. The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra gave its first ever concert on 5 September 1920. But that was only a warm-up, a sort of soft opening if you like. The big public fanfare came two months later, on 10 November 1920, when the all new ensemble descended on Birmingham Town Hall for an inaugural gala conducted by Sir Edward Elgar. The plan in Birmingham this year was to recreate both events, in lavish style. Well, life comes at you fast, doesn’t it? Go online, came the cry from 1,000 armchairs, but

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Affectionate and unthreatening, just like usual: Last Night of the Proms reviewed

The Last Night of the Proms came and went, and it was pretty much as anyone might have predicted, if they’d given it a moment’s thought. A sprinkling of popular classics, a pair of unthreatening premières, the familiar landmarks tastefully and affectionately done, and some show tunes and arias, sung by the soprano Golda Schultz with a generosity and warmth that couldn’t have been more potent if she really had been singing to a packed and cheering Royal Albert Hall, rather than TV cameras and emptiness. It was recognisably a Last Night of the Proms: celebratory in that slipper-wearing BBC way, without ignoring the unavoidable truth that you can’t have

Thursday

Richard Bratby

I’m still not wholly convinced by Kirill Petrenko: Berlin Phil’s Digital Concert Hall reviewed

At the start of Elgar’s Second Symphony the full orchestra hovers, poised. It pulls back; and then, like a dam breaking, the music surges forward in wave upon wave of golden sound. ‘Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!’ writes Elgar, quoting Shelley, at the top of the score, and you won’t hear that spirit captured more exuberantly than in a performance from May 2009 by the Berlin Philharmonic under its future music director Kirill Petrenko. The violins gleam, the horns swell and every player is audibly leaning into the music. Under Petrenko, Elgar’s leaping compound rhythms almost seem to dance. The catch, of course — the truth that gives

Thursday

Richard Bratby

From Middlemarch to Mickey Mouse: a short history of The Spectator’s books and arts pages

The old masters: how well they understood. John Betjeman’s architecture column ran for just over three years in the mid-1950s. Yet during that short run he experienced the moment that comes, sooner or later, to every regular writer in The Spectator’s arts pages. ‘It is maddening the way people corner one and make one discuss politics at the moment,’ he wrote on 23 November 1956, clearly as bored of the Suez crisis as the rest of us were, until recently, by Brexit: Because I write in this paper, people assume that I share its Editor’s views about Suez… But I don’t know what the views of this paper about Suez