Lyn Fletcher, Ann Lawes, Timothy Pooley, David Watkin, Hallé Orchestra, Sir Mark Elder - Elgar: Symphony No. 2 in E Flat Introduction and Allegro (2004)
BAND/ARTIST: Lyn Fletcher, Ann Lawes, Timothy Pooley, David Watkin, Hallé Orchestra, Sir Mark Elder
- Title: Elgar: Symphony No. 2 in E Flat Introduction and Allegro
- Year Of Release: 2004
- Label: Halle Concerts Society
- Genre: Classical
- Quality: flac lossless (tracks) +Booklet
- Total Time: 01:15:27
- Total Size: 305 mb
- WebSite: Album Preview
Tracklist
01. Introduction and Allegro for Strings, Op. 47
02. Song
03. Symphony No. 2 in E-Flat Major, Op. 63: I. Allegro vivace e nobilmente
04. Symphony No. 2 in E-Flat Major, Op. 63: II. Larghetto
05. Symphony No. 2 in E-Flat Major, Op. 63: III. Rondo (Presto)
06. Symphony No. 2 in E-Flat Major, Op. 63: IV. Moderato e maestoso
Some themes of the Second Symphony were sketched in 1904 and perhaps even earlier, but the work as a whole was composed and scored from the sketches within two months at the beginning of 1911, remarkably quick for Elgar. ‘I have worked at fever heat’, he wrote to a friend, ‘and the thing is tremendous in energy.’ The slow movement was written in one week. At the end of the score he wrote a quotation from Shelley: ‘Rarely, rarely comest thou, Spirit of Delight’, and also the place-names Venice and Tintagel. The former was where the Rondo movement was sketched. In St Mark’s Square he took down the rhythm of the opening bars from some itinerant musicians; the latter was the holiday home of his muse Alice Stuart Wortley, with whom the Symphony and Violin Concerto are intimately associated. He had visited her there the previous year. ‘I have recorded last year in the first movement’, he told her. In a letter to his publisher in April 1911, Elgar referred to the ‘Spirit of Delight’ quotation and wrote: ‘To get near the mood of the Symphony, the whole of Shelley’s poem may be read, but the music does not illustrate the whole of the poem, neither does the poem entirely elucidate the music. My attitude toward the poem, or rather to the “Spirit of Delight”, was an attempt to give the reticent Spirit a hint (with sad enough retrospections) as to what we should like to have’. On this CD, Mark Elder reads the complete poem, from which we can hear how ‘Elgarian’ some of it is. For example, ‘I love all that thou lovest, / Spirit of Delight, / The fresh Earth in new leaves dressed / and the starry night; / Autumn evening, and the morn / When the golden mists are born …’ Elgar, like Shelley, loved ‘everything which is Nature’s and, may be, untainted by man’s misery’. The poem ends: ‘I love Love … / But above all things, / Spirit, I love thee—/ Thou art love and life! O come, / Make once more my heart thy home’. To another friend Elgar quoted some lines from another Shelley poem: ‘I do but hide under these notes, like embers, every spark of that which has consumed me’. Elgar conducted the symphony’s first performance in London on 24 May 1911. The hall was not full and the reception was muted. ‘What’s the matter with them, Billy?’ he asked W.H. Reed, leader of the orchestra, ‘They sit there like a lot of stuffed pigs.’ But the quiet and reflective ending of the work hardly invited a noisy ovation and, in any case, such a complex work cannot have been easy to take in at a first hearing when compared with the First Symphony and Violin Concerto, both of which had been wildly applauded at their premieres.
‘Tremendous in energy’ describes the opening. Violins and cellos play repeated B flats followed by an upward swoop of a sixth. The ‘Spirit of Delight’ motto-theme is the descending phrase in the third bar. The second subject, after nearly 50 bars, relaxes the mood of exuberance into a nostalgic and poetic vein, but the exuberance returns until it subsides into a ghostly episode introduced by muted strings, muted horns and eight hollow-sounding notes on the harp. Then, over throbbing timpani and plucked basses, the cellos have a new and yearning melody, described by Elgar as ‘a sort of malign influence wandering thro’ the summer night in the garden’. This sinister nocturne vanishes when the motto-theme returns. But its influence lingers, as does the poetry of the second subject in the long recapitulation, which ends in a blaze of resurgent energy.
The Larghetto has the character of a funeral march, but although the symphony is dedicated to the memory of King Edward VII, this is not a state funeral. It was sketched in November 1903 when Elgar’s friend, the Liverpool businessman and amateur musician Alfred E. Rodewald, died suddenly at the age of 43. Elgar was deeply distressed. The movement, therefore, is a personal elegy, in C minor, but the simple grandeur of its marchlike melody, wonderfully scored, also makes it apt for national mourning. At one point the oboe sings its own threnody (ad. lib.) above the tread of the brass and basses and the surge of the string tone. In a letter to his publisher written before the first performance, Elgar referred to this oboe passage as a ‘feminine voice lamenting over the broad manly first theme … and like a woman dropping a flower on the man’s grave’. An impassioned climax is followed by the benedictory return of the ‘Spirit of Delight’ theme.
A Rondo takes the place of a scherzo. ‘Very wild and headstrong, with soothing pastoral strains in between and very brilliant’ was Elgar’s description. It begins restlessly, but the second subject has a more measured stride. One of the pastoral strains, introduced by woodwind, generates an extraordinary episode when the ‘malign influence’ from the first movement returns aggressively and is hammered out by drums and roared by the brass, obliterating all else. Elgar associated this passage with lines from Tennyson’s Maud: ‘And my heart is a handful of dust / And the wheels go over my head … / The hoofs of the horses beat / Beat into my scalp and brain’. He described it to orchestras in rehearsal as ‘like that horrible throbbing in the head during some fever’. The nightmare fades and the music slips easily back into its former mode. A dignified, flowing theme opens the finale, followed by a jauntier theme and then by a nobilmente tune written many years earlier as a description of the Hallé’s conductor Hans Richter. These themes are developed, often restlessly, sometimes fugally, until the ‘Spirit of Delight’, expanded and slow, returns in a consolatory coda of rich beauty to end this ‘passionate pilgrimage of a soul’, to use Elgar’s words.
The Introduction and Allegro was first performed in March 1905 by the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra, for whom it was written. It was not well played and the work took several years to be recognised as a masterpiece. It is laid out for string quartet and full strings and ‘is really a tribute to that sweet borderland [Herefordshire] where I have made my home’. After the grand opening statement for the full strings, the quartet answers with an allegretto theme over which Elgar wrote a quotation from Cymbeline, ‘Smiling with a sigh’. Then a solo viola plays the gorgeous ‘Welsh melody’, so called because Elgar had planned to use it in 1901 in a ‘Welsh Overture’. The Allegro section is in G major. It incorporates ‘a devil of a fugue’ and the work ends with a richly harmonised re-statement of the Welsh theme. Every means of exploiting and exploring the power and variety of string-tone is employed in this concise, wide-ranging yet almost classically designed work.
01. Introduction and Allegro for Strings, Op. 47
02. Song
03. Symphony No. 2 in E-Flat Major, Op. 63: I. Allegro vivace e nobilmente
04. Symphony No. 2 in E-Flat Major, Op. 63: II. Larghetto
05. Symphony No. 2 in E-Flat Major, Op. 63: III. Rondo (Presto)
06. Symphony No. 2 in E-Flat Major, Op. 63: IV. Moderato e maestoso
Some themes of the Second Symphony were sketched in 1904 and perhaps even earlier, but the work as a whole was composed and scored from the sketches within two months at the beginning of 1911, remarkably quick for Elgar. ‘I have worked at fever heat’, he wrote to a friend, ‘and the thing is tremendous in energy.’ The slow movement was written in one week. At the end of the score he wrote a quotation from Shelley: ‘Rarely, rarely comest thou, Spirit of Delight’, and also the place-names Venice and Tintagel. The former was where the Rondo movement was sketched. In St Mark’s Square he took down the rhythm of the opening bars from some itinerant musicians; the latter was the holiday home of his muse Alice Stuart Wortley, with whom the Symphony and Violin Concerto are intimately associated. He had visited her there the previous year. ‘I have recorded last year in the first movement’, he told her. In a letter to his publisher in April 1911, Elgar referred to the ‘Spirit of Delight’ quotation and wrote: ‘To get near the mood of the Symphony, the whole of Shelley’s poem may be read, but the music does not illustrate the whole of the poem, neither does the poem entirely elucidate the music. My attitude toward the poem, or rather to the “Spirit of Delight”, was an attempt to give the reticent Spirit a hint (with sad enough retrospections) as to what we should like to have’. On this CD, Mark Elder reads the complete poem, from which we can hear how ‘Elgarian’ some of it is. For example, ‘I love all that thou lovest, / Spirit of Delight, / The fresh Earth in new leaves dressed / and the starry night; / Autumn evening, and the morn / When the golden mists are born …’ Elgar, like Shelley, loved ‘everything which is Nature’s and, may be, untainted by man’s misery’. The poem ends: ‘I love Love … / But above all things, / Spirit, I love thee—/ Thou art love and life! O come, / Make once more my heart thy home’. To another friend Elgar quoted some lines from another Shelley poem: ‘I do but hide under these notes, like embers, every spark of that which has consumed me’. Elgar conducted the symphony’s first performance in London on 24 May 1911. The hall was not full and the reception was muted. ‘What’s the matter with them, Billy?’ he asked W.H. Reed, leader of the orchestra, ‘They sit there like a lot of stuffed pigs.’ But the quiet and reflective ending of the work hardly invited a noisy ovation and, in any case, such a complex work cannot have been easy to take in at a first hearing when compared with the First Symphony and Violin Concerto, both of which had been wildly applauded at their premieres.
‘Tremendous in energy’ describes the opening. Violins and cellos play repeated B flats followed by an upward swoop of a sixth. The ‘Spirit of Delight’ motto-theme is the descending phrase in the third bar. The second subject, after nearly 50 bars, relaxes the mood of exuberance into a nostalgic and poetic vein, but the exuberance returns until it subsides into a ghostly episode introduced by muted strings, muted horns and eight hollow-sounding notes on the harp. Then, over throbbing timpani and plucked basses, the cellos have a new and yearning melody, described by Elgar as ‘a sort of malign influence wandering thro’ the summer night in the garden’. This sinister nocturne vanishes when the motto-theme returns. But its influence lingers, as does the poetry of the second subject in the long recapitulation, which ends in a blaze of resurgent energy.
The Larghetto has the character of a funeral march, but although the symphony is dedicated to the memory of King Edward VII, this is not a state funeral. It was sketched in November 1903 when Elgar’s friend, the Liverpool businessman and amateur musician Alfred E. Rodewald, died suddenly at the age of 43. Elgar was deeply distressed. The movement, therefore, is a personal elegy, in C minor, but the simple grandeur of its marchlike melody, wonderfully scored, also makes it apt for national mourning. At one point the oboe sings its own threnody (ad. lib.) above the tread of the brass and basses and the surge of the string tone. In a letter to his publisher written before the first performance, Elgar referred to this oboe passage as a ‘feminine voice lamenting over the broad manly first theme … and like a woman dropping a flower on the man’s grave’. An impassioned climax is followed by the benedictory return of the ‘Spirit of Delight’ theme.
A Rondo takes the place of a scherzo. ‘Very wild and headstrong, with soothing pastoral strains in between and very brilliant’ was Elgar’s description. It begins restlessly, but the second subject has a more measured stride. One of the pastoral strains, introduced by woodwind, generates an extraordinary episode when the ‘malign influence’ from the first movement returns aggressively and is hammered out by drums and roared by the brass, obliterating all else. Elgar associated this passage with lines from Tennyson’s Maud: ‘And my heart is a handful of dust / And the wheels go over my head … / The hoofs of the horses beat / Beat into my scalp and brain’. He described it to orchestras in rehearsal as ‘like that horrible throbbing in the head during some fever’. The nightmare fades and the music slips easily back into its former mode. A dignified, flowing theme opens the finale, followed by a jauntier theme and then by a nobilmente tune written many years earlier as a description of the Hallé’s conductor Hans Richter. These themes are developed, often restlessly, sometimes fugally, until the ‘Spirit of Delight’, expanded and slow, returns in a consolatory coda of rich beauty to end this ‘passionate pilgrimage of a soul’, to use Elgar’s words.
The Introduction and Allegro was first performed in March 1905 by the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra, for whom it was written. It was not well played and the work took several years to be recognised as a masterpiece. It is laid out for string quartet and full strings and ‘is really a tribute to that sweet borderland [Herefordshire] where I have made my home’. After the grand opening statement for the full strings, the quartet answers with an allegretto theme over which Elgar wrote a quotation from Cymbeline, ‘Smiling with a sigh’. Then a solo viola plays the gorgeous ‘Welsh melody’, so called because Elgar had planned to use it in 1901 in a ‘Welsh Overture’. The Allegro section is in G major. It incorporates ‘a devil of a fugue’ and the work ends with a richly harmonised re-statement of the Welsh theme. Every means of exploiting and exploring the power and variety of string-tone is employed in this concise, wide-ranging yet almost classically designed work.
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