Homage to Elgar

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

The two inner movements raise more difficulties than the two outer, though in very different ways. The second is closest to echt-Elgar, extant music from Arthur requiring minimal handling; one of Elgar's `dream children', wistful and fragile, growing momentarily forceful before nearly revealing its elusive heart, then fading out at inconsequential length. The slightly fusty quality is focused by comparison with its sibling in the two Wand of Youth suites, vivid material from boyhood springs, touched with the mature mastery of prime. After this, the 3rd symphony intermezzo seems droopy, and not really belonging to the total scheme despite some cross-referencing.

Reservations about the adagio that follows are harder to voice. At the BBCSO's try-out last autumn, this movement made the deepest impression, and it sounds magnificent still, `at a distance'. Closer proximity reveals the flaws - the internal weakness of the two principal melodies, a solemn funeral march and a consolatory pastoral vision; their short-circuitings, peterings out, general lack of focus, stand in sharp contradistinction to the confident melodic paragraphing in the slow movements of both completed symphonies. The dithery character is moving in itself, and one would willingly rise to the big elegiac emotion clearly intended, were it fully present. Wholly convincing, though, is the tiny link been the two melodies by the master, which is, in fact, entirely Payne's doing.

Which suggests a wry question that might resonate beyond the admiration and gratitude occasioned by this particular event. Could 'elaboration' like Payne's be achieved in the absence of an actual cause, such as a master's unfinished opus from an epoch of well-loved and understood musical language? Elgar's 4th and Rachmaninov's, Mahler's 11th, a 9th from Sibelius (since his 8th, known to have been completed before being disseminated in marginalia then destroyed, is already a candidate for direct rescue) just for a start, before reaching back to Tchaikovsky, Schumann, Mozart, Monteverdi, Josquin . . The uncertain idioms of 'difficult' modern music, together with its palpable failure to gain popular acceptance, have much to learn from the enormous sigh of welcome raised by such essentially nostalgic work of reclamation and replication. It might enable many current composers to come clean and dare to write the music that they, too, have secretly preferred all along. It might liberate embargoed knowledge and unstrangulate expressive gold.

Elgar/Payne Symphony No.3 is recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davis on NMC D053; Anthony Payne introduces Elgar's sketches and his elaboration of them on NMC D052.