Elgar
The Joy of Easy Listening/ The Prince and the Composer, BBC FourFriday, 27 May 2011
Once upon a time, "easy listening" was a term of abuse and contempt, intended to evoke everything uncool, unhip and musically middle-aged. It meant pipe, cardigan, golf and Bing Crosby, and it was the last thing you'd hear before you were felled... Read more... |
BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Hoddinott Hall, CardiffThursday, 12 May 2011
It’s a neat-sounding idea for a concert: a sequence of works composed in the year the previous composer died. Neat, but not necessarily revealing. This one started with Elgar’s Cockaigne, composed – symbolically, I assume – in 1900, and ended with... Read more... |
The Kingdom, London Symphony Orchestra, Elder, Barbican HallSunday, 30 January 2011
So Starbucks-like is its reach, so tarnished its modern legacy, it's easy to overlook just how brilliant the ideology of Christianity is. How seductively counterintuitive the idea of a God who was not just a man but a bum of a man must have seemed.... Read more... |
Elgar's Enigma - A Love Child Named Pearl?Wednesday, 26 January 2011
UPDATE 2015: Four years ago, in January 2011, I wrote this article about the music critic and biographer Michael Kennedy's search for the missing portion of Elgar's life. It identified a Mrs Dora Nelson as the composer's mistress and mother of a... Read more... |
Elgar: The Man Behind the Mask, BBC FourFriday, 12 November 2010
Where is the real Elgar to be found – in his boisterous self-portrait at the end of the Enigma Variations, the warm, feminine sentiment of the Violin Concerto and the First Symphony’s Adagio, or the nightmares of the Second Symphony? No doubt in... Read more... |
BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sir Andrew Davis, BarbicanFriday, 08 October 2010
Elgar and Delius are two geniuses who only ever composed themselves - the first drawing heavily on psychology and physiognomy, the second drenching his country visions in painful nostalgia. So it made good sense to have man and nature side by side... Read more... |
The Last Night of the Proms, BBC One: The Twitter ReviewSaturday, 11 September 2010
Part 2 @bbcproms. The madness begins. Ms Derham has not switched gowns in the interval. No sign of Titchmarsh, for which we must give thanks.The "traditional" necklace of laurels for Sir Henry Wood's bust. Wonder if he'd welcome his head being... Read more... |
The Kingdom, Three Choirs FestivalSunday, 08 August 2010
The Three Choirs Festival is with us again, for the 283rd year – almost as many, it seems, as The Mousetrap: this year we are in Gloucester. Nowadays, though, this great festival is no longer imprisoned, Barchester-like, in the cathedral close, but... Read more... |
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Runnicles, Royal Albert HallWednesday, 04 August 2010
What a quintessential Prom: a quartet of works by English composers which aspire to international status, and in three cases wholly succeed, performed by the BBC's Scottish orchestra at world-class level under its homegrown but deservedly... Read more... |
Classical Music CDs Round-Up 8Saturday, 22 May 2010
This month the selection varies from sackbutts to serialism, by way of condensed Wagner, Elgar conducted by the much-missed Vernon Handley and music from both Shostakovich and a disciple of his. Among contemporary music there is Osvaldo Golijov’s... Read more... |
The Berlin Philharmonic European Concert 2010, Sheldonian Theatre, OxfordSaturday, 01 May 2010
"Madness! Madness! Everywhere madness!" The unsung words of cobbler-philosopher Hans Sachs in the third-act prelude to Wagner's Die Meistersinger might seem like an odd opening manifesto for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra's annual May Day... Read more... |
Philharmonia Orchestra, Ashkenazy, RFHSunday, 31 January 2010
There are still pockets of musical snobs who want to keep Elgar's two symphonies for the English, and off the worldwide roll call of orchestral masterpieces. Yet a steady line of international conductors - from Solti and Svetlanov to... Read more... |
