In these moments, we’re reminded that this music is filled with characters and distinct personas. Strangely, amid all of this darkness and sonic depth, there are also swirling comedy and frivolity. Some of this piece’s most atmospheric details are barely audible, like the distant rumble of the tympani in this passage. Listen to the way this theme develops as it is passed from one group of instruments to another, moving from gloomy acceptance to brief, anguished outbursts. An almost shell-shocked single viola line announces the movement’s wandering main theme (around the 1:33 mark). … The work itself is lovely stuff, very simple – that pregnant simplicity that has come upon Elgar’s music in the last couple of years – but with a profound wisdom and beauty underlying its simplicity.įrom its opening solo cadenza, the first movement of Elgar’s Cello Concerto is filled with voices of lament and nostalgia. Whatever the explanation, the sad fact remains that never, in all probability, has so great an orchestra made so lamentable an exhibition of itself. There have been rumours about during the week of inadequate rehearsal. Regarding the disastrous first performance, the critic Ernest Newman wrote, Following the death of his wife in 1920, for all practical purposes, Elgar entered a permanent compositional silence. When the London Symphony Orchestra premiered Elgar’s Concerto with cellist Felix Salmond on Octoto a less-than-full Queen’s Hall, the conductor Albert Coates did not afford the music the respect of adequate rehearsal time. The nineteenth century world he had known was quickly slipping away and the progressive thrust of music had pushed onward to the bold, new sounds of composers such as Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The horrifying carnage of the first World War left Elgar depressed and unable to compose. The summer before, he had been able to hear the sound of distant artillery in the night, rumbling across the English Channel from France. It was Elgar’s last significant work, written during the summer of 1919 at “Brinkwells,” his cottage near the village of Fittleworth, Sussex. This is what we hear most strikingly in the Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. The stirring Pomp and Circumstance Military Marchesprovide a glimpse of the self assurance, order, and security of the British Empire at its height.īut there’s a deeper side to Elgar’s music- a sense of introspection, loneliness, and even melancholy. 32, music written for the 1897 Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. You can hear this in the majestically celebratory final moments of the Enigma Variations or the Imperial March, Op. The music of Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934) is often characterized as stately and regal- the musical embodiment of everything British.
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