Music Richard Osborne
ELGAR 1918
To St James’s, Paddington, to attend a gala evening to celebrate the 65th birthday of a much admired cello teacher, Sue Lowe. From what one of Sir Thomas Beecham’s more irksome correspondents used to refer to as a ‘coign of vantage’, I marvel at how full the place is and how abuzz. I marvel, too, that two-thirds of the audience are under the age of forty. Reports of the death of classical music are much exaggerated.
The Cello Fest was confined to the evening’s second half. It included a Duo by Couperin, a charming court divertissement Jacqueline du Pré liked to play, nicely realised by Adrian Brendel and Tim Lowe; a luminous performance of the famous ‘Ária’ from Villa-lobos’s
Bachianas Brasileiras with Amanda Forbes as the soprano soloist; and, to end, the perfect song of thanksgiving: Hymnus for 12 Cellos by the fabled Leipzig-born cellist and teacher Julius Klengel.
The evening began with a single work, the Piano Quintet which Elgar wrote in 1918 as the First World War drew to its close. It is one of Elgar’s finest compositions and this performance realised it as well as any I’ve experienced. Indeed, it put me in mind of that still matchless recording Harriet Cohen and the Stratton String Quartet made for HMV in October 1933 as a Christmas present for the composer. Little could they know that the recording – the discs of the slow movement in particular – would be by Elgar’s bedside, a late consolation, as he lay dying five months later.
The war had brought Elgar unforeseen troubles, not least the shock of being traduced in the public prints. His pity for the plight of army horses was taken out of context. Worse, he was increasingly seen as a representative of a ‘past’ that progressive thinkers were determined to put in the dock of history.
What nonsense this was. I’ve just been listening to a dramatically ripe yet sonically acute new recording by Sir Andrew Davis and the BBC Philharmonic of the last big orchestral piece Elgar completed before the outbreak of war, his Symphonic Study Falstaff (Chandos CHSA 5188). Grandioso is how Elgar marks Henry V’s imposing late entry, yet what a chill there is in those trumpetings. Here are sounds apt to Henry’s Daleklike dismissal of Falstaff, ‘Presume not that I am the thing I was.’ With Henry’s accession, war beckoned; and so it did in 1913, as Elgar all too keenly sensed.
By 1917, Elgar was in a poor way, beset by ill health and badly shaken by the death on the Western Front of the son of his earliest love, Helen Weaver.
Then, in the late spring of 1917, he and Lady Elgar leased a cottage in woods near Fittleworth in Sussex. A piano arrived the following May and so Elgar began composing again: an exquisite string quartet, the Piano Quintet, and the beginnings of the immortal Cello Concerto.
The place was said to be haunted. The tale of an early settlement of Spanish monks who’d been struck down after practising ungodly rites may have been the fantasy of a friend who had been reading too much Bulwer-lytton. But the trees on a nearby plateau were real enough: twisted and dead, the victims of a lightning strike. Lady Elgar imagined their ‘dance’ as a ‘wail of sin’. As an image of the wastelands of war, they spoke volumes.
‘It’s strange music,’ Elgar told the Quintet’s dedicatee, Ernest Newman. ‘I like it – but it’s ghostly stuff.’ Yet as Mendelssohn observed, music is more articulate than words can ever be.‘every page bears an indelible signature,’ wrote an early commentator on the Quintet. ‘Here is music, and a personality, over which we may brood.’
Quite so. To anyone who knows their Elgar, what a store of thoughts, regrets, and endless shifting memories are here.
I last heard the Quintet in Pershore Abbey. These acoustically generous buildings suit the music, since they cause modern performers to pause and take their time. Elgar’s score is littered with sudden shifts of tempo and dynamics that bespeak, not proprietorial meddling, but a private narrative of more than usual complexity.
After the ghostly plainsong of the work’s opening, the first movement moves like a centrifuge: at one level urgent and intent, yet possessed of lingering beauties that both trouble time and defy it. Skilfully shepherded by pianist Andrew Brownell, the London players realised this to perfection.
The person these musicians were honouring began her teaching career with the Barnsley Music Service – ‘Nay, lass, thar’s wasting thar time, this is a brass area’; since when, she has taught in many of the country’s leading music academies.
As Dickie Bird and Sir Michael Parkinson never tire of reminding us, good things come out of Barnsley.