Homage to Elgar

Spectator, The, Feb 28, 1998 by Holloway, Robin

The event of the decade in English music is the rescue of Elgar's 3rd symphony. It has been handsomely handled: the BBC, who originally commissioned the work in 1932, laid on a studio try-out last autumn which will not easily be forgotten by those lucky enough to attend. And coinciding with this month's public premiere comes a score (Boosey and Hawkes) and a recording with the BBC Symphony Orchestra 65 years on, directed so idiomatically by Andrew Davis as to sound classic already. The ripples will die down leaving a substantial addition to the orchestral repertory and permanent gratitude to Anthony Payne, whose carefully formulated 'elaboration' of the sketches is, in fact, a practical act of homage of the most fascinating kind.

His brief - to realise Elgar's fragments with the family's approval before their copyright ends in 2004, opening the way to possibly less loving and certainly less skilful hands - might appear straightforward. What he has actually achieved is far more remarkable: a living simulacrum of a largescale late-romantic/early-modern symphony by one of its greatest masters, using that master's own material (for the most part already existent, albeit patchy), and intuiting his forms and processes (which for the most part did not exist) by analogy or likelihood.

Which is quite different from the nevertheless comparable case of symphonic retrieval from the same stylistic epoch, Mahler's lOth. Mahler left a complete scheme of compelling architectural and rhetorical power, with some sections fullyworked and scored, some bare and rudimentary, and plenty betwixt and between; a draft to be worked up with his usual intensity of detail. Whereas Elgar left no overall shape beyond the indication of the four movements, and a mass of material much of whose place and function is unspecified.

Yet, this is how he had always worked. A list of 'ingredients' for both completed symphonies can still be disconcerting; such discrepant sources -- thumbnail sketches of friends or pets, landscapes and moonscapes, city lights and shadows, grief personal and ceremonial, a facetious entry in a guest book - in some instances dating back down the decades. If by chance the end products hadn't come about, we would doubt that they could have. Elgar's processes are the antithesis of organic growth from germinal cells. His diverse materials fuse and synthesise at final rather than primal stage. In so doing they gather many passing inspirations of detailed working, and also the wealth of internal relationships that such methods would seem to have ruled out: and, incidentally yet inevitably, the most basic element of all, symphonic form.

So it would possibly have been with the 3rd. Material lay to hand, some comparatively recent (incidental music of 1923 for Laurence Binyon's Arthur), some pre-war; and Payne is surely right to sense a renaissance of creative vigour in the attempts to work them together that were cut off by Elgar's final illness. (Hats off for perceiving this so many years back, when the going consensus even among fervent Elgarians was negative.) All the same, the symphony's most vital material is its oldest. This is true in a metaphorical sense, because through its every page Payne's (and our) love of the great canonical works constantly shines. And true specifically in that its best music - the very opening, realised in every detail by Elgar himself, including the orchestration - hails from his richest period (1899-1913), being intended originally for The Judgement, third in the oratoriotriptych abandoned after The Kingdom.

Probably because it is imbued throughout with the granitic memorability of this opening stretch, the first movement strikes me as the most successful as a whole. The purposeful trajectory carries over some wobbly moments; and many places, notably the return of the second subject, and the entire coda, are wholly convincing, indeed masterly.

Payne excels at codas. By far his hardest task, he explains on the disc setting out the sketches and what he has done with them, was to discover, in the absence of indication, how the complete work should end. His finale convincingly realises from the start a full Elgarian texture and momentum, made from the work's sparsest sources. Material from the Arthur music touches off a vein of chivalry familiar since Froissart back in 1890 and reaching its noblest incarnation to depict Prince Hal in Falstaff (1913). Mistress Quickly is also present from that wonderful work; later the fat knight himself unmistakably appears, also a reminder of the percussion motif that characterises the scarecrow army. All this is skilfully woven together without solving the problem of the ending. Payne's answer is to crown the weightiness of the preceding movements by growing darker and more serious. An inspired transition leads to a coda specifically recreating the effect of The Wagon Passes, the one strong number in the otherwise tedious Nursery Suite that Elgar had put together in 1931 for the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose. Payne's adaptation of the obsessive rhythm to the finale's authentic material is a stroke of genius, admirable equally in imaginative boldness and technical address. The concluding gong-stroke, however, seems whimsical, a gesture borrowed from the alien world of Mahler and Viennese expressionism.