Elgar's Hillside

[Sergeant Rock]

I've been tracking (though not heatedly) the ongoing conversation viz. The Spirit of England . . . in fact not close enough to remember if there is a preferred recording.

Gibson, SNO, Chandos

[karlhenning]

And thank you, Sarge!

[Elgarian]

I've been tracking (though not heatedly) the ongoing conversation viz. The Spirit of England . . . in fact not close enough to remember if there is a preferred recording. No matter, I found dirt-cheap copies of two of them . . . .

I'm in a rush, and no time to chat at length (though I want to, and will later), but briefly:  Karl, it's the Gibson SNO with Teresa Cahill that you want. By all means have them all, but this is THE ONE. You only need to hear Teresa Cahill's first entry 'Spirit of England go before us', and listen to the way she sings the word 'England'. Felicity Lott, in her version, sings it like it's just a word. Cahill sings it knowing it to be Albion.

Also, Mike sings on this recording!

Lots more to say later - and maybe some extra info in a PM.

[karlhenning]

Appreciate your kind dashing off a word, Alan!

[Luke]

According to Alan, the top rec is the Gibson w various Scots. At least I hope it is, as that's the one I got. Sounds wonderful to me, anyway.

Ha, missed a whole page of discussion which makes this post redundant!

[Luke]

I'm in a rush, and no time to chat at length (though I want to, and will later), but briefly:  Karl, it's the Gibson SNO with Teresa Cahill that you want. By all means have them all, but this is THE ONE. You only need to hear Teresa Cahill's first entry 'Spirit of England go before us', and listen to the way she sings the word 'England'. Felicity Lott, in her version, sings it like it's just a word. Cahill sings it knowing it to be Albion.

Yes, that really sent shivers through me, as I tried to parse in my post!

Also, Mike sings on this recording!

Various Scots, as I said.... 

[Elgarian]

... within a single listen The Spirit of England was firmly lodged in my mind, and I wanted it again and again. Surely it is the title that is off-putting for some, but (I think I am reading it correctly) Alan is right about this piece - it is no patriotic tub-thumper, obviously, but more than that, it is more concerned with general feelings of nobility and honour amid grief than it is with anything specifically national. I thought it ironic, for a moment, that the choir and orchestra were Scotish... but that's only an irony because of a titular issue, and I felt that Elgar and Binyon surely included Scots as Englishmen here (how they must love that!  ). But then, listening, I realised that really the piece is bigger than that, too - this 'England' (patronising as it may seem to others) is really just standing for something bigger, a spirit that can exist anywhere that there is pride and stoicism and controled, quiet determination and whatnot (even if that is not what Elgar/Binyon meant, it is how it struck me). And those ideas are very powerful when put in compelling terms such as those of Elgar's, even to someone who wouldn't usually give that kind of thing a second thought.

And then, as I listened, towards the last bars of the first section, another thought struck me - perhaps these Scots can sing with such gusto because they have that little distance that the title enforces...because for me, at this point, and even as an entirely unpatriotic loony lefty Brit who happens to be English, this piece began to bring tears to my eyes, against my will, really. I was trying to talk to my daughter about it, about the Elgar of the Coronation Ode (also on the disc - as a boy I played that piece under David Wilcocks in the LSSO, so it's special to me in a different way) and the later Elgar of The Spirit of England, about the Edwardian era and the death blow that was WWI...but how could I when my voice was quavering with some of Elgar's pull-no-punches word-setting ([Spirit [upwards-surging line] of Eng [top B] land....ardent-eyed [passionate unison]). Glorious stuff. Thank you, Alan!

How fabulous to read this post. My self-imposed guardianship and publicity-managership of The Spirit of England over several decades has been mostly a lonely vigil outside the confines of the Elgar Society. It's hardly ever performed, so folk conclude it must be a minor work. Or they look at the title, and turn elsewhere without listening to it, repelled by the thought of what they're sure must be a jingoistic rouser. You explain it's a genuinely profound War piece, that it's Elgar's Requiem, but they don't believe you when you say it's not a tub-thumper. You explain that it's about issues far greater, wider, and deeper than the title suggests, and indeed one of his very greatest works; but you can tell they've made their mind up. So to read your post, Luke, and see how completely you've absorbed it, and all that it truly stands for, is simply marvellous. You've made my day.

(Wonderful that you've picked up on that 'Spirit of England' line, btw!)

Incidentally, the alternative recordings available are worthy efforts and I wouldn't wish to disparage them. I have them myself, and listen to them occasionally just to check whether my opinion has changed. But no: for me, the Cahill/Gibson/SNO is on another level entirely.

[karlhenning]

How fabulous to read this post. My self-imposed guardianship and publicity-managership of The Spirit of England over several decades has been mostly a lonely vigil outside the confines of the Elgar Society. It's hardly ever performed, so folk conclude it must be a minor work. Or they look at the title, and turn elsewhere without listening to it, repelled by the thought of what they're sure must be a jingoistic rouser. You explain it's a genuinely profound War piece, that it's Elgar's Requiem, but they don't believe you when you say it's not a tub-thumper. You explain that it's about issues far greater, wider, and deeper than the title suggests, and indeed one of his very greatest works; but you can tell they've made their mind up.

Ah, the heartache of the My mind is made up, don't confuse me with the facts stance . . ..

So to read your post, Luke, and see how completely you've absorbed it, and all that it truly stands for, is simply marvellous. You've made my day.

(Wonderful that you've picked up on that 'Spirit of England' line, btw!)

Incidentally, the alternative recordings available are worthy efforts and I wouldn't wish to disparage them. I have them myself, and listen to them occasionally just to check whether my opinion has changed. But no: for me, the Cahill/Gibson/SNO is on another level entirely.

Glad of your reassurance, Alan, that I should not regret my prospective, modest superfluity of recordings . . . .

[71 dB]

The Spirit of England is hardly ever performed, so folk conclude it must be a minor work. Or they look at the title, and turn elsewhere without listening to it, repelled by the thought of what they're sure must be a jingoistic rouser.

Well said. As long as I have been into Elgar I have felt so many of his works have been considered "minor" for whatever ignorant reason.

Shockingly, Hickox on EMI is my only version of the work and I am still in the process of purchasing Gibson on Chandos. 

[TheGSMoeller]

Elgar's Hillside has spoken, and I have listened...just shipped yesterday...

[asin]B000000A9N[/asin]


Very excited to have a first listen to "The Spirit of England"

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

I listened to the The Spirit of England, and also in the requisite performance (Gibson/Cahill). There is no doubt that this is a marvellous and moving work. Every movement has its own unforgettable character. Elgar's musical language is both grand and wrenching. My favourite (hair-raising) dissonant is at the word 'go' in 'Now in thy splendour GO before us' at the end of 'The Fourth of August', where a low G clashes sensationally with a piercing F# (I had a look at the Vocal Score). As a Dutchman I can 'watch' this music more from the outside (like Luke said about the Scottish performers). Still, the sentiment it expresses is quite universal.


Another thought: because Teresa Cahill is so superb (she reminds me of Janet Baker), I saw the Spirit of England as a sort of Marianne. But this work can be sung by a tenor, too. I wonder how that would work.


Final thought: how different Elgar and Delius are! Delius's Requiem is dedicated to fallen artists, is harshly anti-religious and pantheistic, celebrating the seasons and eternal renewal, whereas Elgar mourns for 'our glorious men, with a special thought for the WORCESTERS' and is forever England.

[Luke]

Still, the sentiment it expresses is quite universal.

Yes, and there's the point - I think when this work speaks of England it is only an English composer talking about those feelings of pride in the 'national character' that most of us have in some degree about our own country. Substitute your own country's name and the rush of sentiment is probably more or less the same. [This would be the place to talk about the manipulative power of music - listening to this work in the last few days has left me feeling highly manipulated, into areas of feeling I don't usually roam around in. And yet that's only what all music does, to a greater or lesser extent]

****

Was listening to the Violin Concerto tonight. It left me reeling (again, but every time I listen it does so more and more). It was the Bean recording, naturally - though I can say with some pride, given the recent run on Bean, that this was actually the recording I was brought up on, though my CD purchase was more recent. I've always adored this reading; it was nice to find I wasn't alone!

When I was a boy, I read and re-read Ralph Hill's old books on 'The Symphony' and 'The Concerto.' Over and over again, incessantly. It's how I acquired my working knowledge of much of the standard repertoire, before my score-buying took off. So that is how I got to know the Elgar VC, Bean on the turntable, Ralph Hill's book in hand. It is years since I read that book, but I am pretty sure that somewhere near the beginning of its discussion of the Elgar VC is a phrase that runs along these lines:

'At the top of the score Elgar enscribed 'Aqui está encerrada el alma de .....' ('Herein is enshrined the soul of .....'), intending the dots to stand for his enigmatic 'Windflower.' But the inscription could equally well read, 'Herein is enshrined the soul of the violin.'

As a kid I thought I knew what that meant - that the piece is wonderfully written work for the violin that shows a great understanding and use of all its various moods and capacities. And it is that, of course. But listening today I thought of that little passage again. The more I know this work the more I think there is nothing else like it (as a boy, and a celllist to boot, the more obvious charms of the Cello Concerto lured me even more strongly, but I hardly listen to that work now, in comparison - it is the mysterious VC that pulls me back again and again). It is a Violin Concerto, but with Violin written in Upper Case - there is no possibility of imagining any of the solo line on any other instrument; no transcription could ever be made without utterly destroying everything about the piece, and the more I thought on this, the more I realised how unusual that is in a VC (I could imagine workable transcriptions of the Brahms, the Sibelius, the Tchaikovsky, the Mendelssohn etc etc; Beethoven even did it for us with his own...! But I can't imagine the Elgar in this way) The solo line moves as mercurially as a dancer, turning on a pin, flexible, bending itself to others and others to it. A hallmark of this music is the kaleidoscopic chnges of tone and mood within a single phrase, so that we do not have chunks of virtuosity followed by chunks of lyricism, but so that we have both and either all the time, mixed up capriciously and movingly. Like a real human being feeling real emotions, not an actor declaiming someone else's. Sequences in this piece are rarely verbatim; we hear a phrase, and when we hear it again, five seconds later, one tone higher, it is inflected (for example) with brusque double-stops or some such, propelling its emotional journey as if from within, not from without. It is truly wondrous stuff, and written with such blazing conviction from first note to last. I thought, all of a sudden, of another piece which suddenly seemed to share some hard-to-define quality with this amazing VC - and really I can't think of more than these two. The other one is Mahler's 9th (I'm talking about its best movement, the first one). That too has this amazing detailed, nuanced work, always in flux, always moving, the immense emotional charge of the music changing at every turn and carrying the listener breathlessly with it. It too has this hard-to-resist invitation to overuse the words mercurial and kaleidoscopic when describing its sound, but like the Elgar VC 1st movement, all this mercuriality etc takes place within a strange tempo which feels like an often-turbulent Andante even though it is nominally an Allegro, and is thus not mercurial at all. Very odd, and very wonderful.

I'm not sure any of that even makes any sense. 

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Yes, and there's the point - I think when this work speaks of England it is only an English composer talking about those feelings of pride in the 'national character' that most of us have in some degree about our own country. Substitute your own country's name and the rush of sentiment is probably more or less the same. [This would be the place to talk about the manipulative power of music - listening to this work in the last few days has left me feeling highly manipulated, into areas of feeling I don't usually roam around in. And yet that's only what all music does, to a greater or lesser extent]

Not many are really 'safe' from that rush of sentiment. Even I couldn't help feeling a sense of national pride when I was in Denmark once - there is a museum at Frederiksborg Slot, a royal castle, and one painting depicted the defeat of the Swedes in Copenhagen, where the Danes were helped by the Dutch (for business reasons, of course), sailing in in their colossal-looking ships, the Dutch flag flying merrily...

I'm not sure any of that even makes any sense. 

It does. I think what you say is: I seem to be listening to an intense natural process, both emotional and intellectual, rendered in shocking realtime.

[Elgarian]

A hallmark of this music is the kaleidoscopic chnges of tone and mood within a single phrase, so that we do not have chunks of virtuosity followed by chunks of lyricism, but so that we have both and either all the time, mixed up capriciously and movingly. Like a real human being feeling real emotions, not an actor declaiming someone else's. Sequences in this piece are rarely verbatim; we hear a phrase, and when we hear it again, five seconds later, one tone higher, it is inflected (for example) with brusque double-stops or some such, propelling its emotional journey as if from within, not from without. It is truly wondrous stuff, and written with such blazing conviction from first note to last.

Well it makes sense to me, by golly. We express ourselves in different ways, Luke, but I think the driving force is very similar. If I were to have a shot at identifying the underlying character, it would be related somehow to some sort of perpetually shifting polarisation. As you suggest, he is continually operating between extreme positions - extremes being understood in different ways. So you, here, contrast chunks of virtuosity and chunks of lyricism, not presented as separate, distinct passages, but interwoven. Now I'd say that is characteristic of this concerto; and in exactly the same way I'd talk about a similar interplay between masculine and feminine. Between public face and private. Between even, perhaps, manic and depressive. And exactly as you say - this is what life is like - and certainly what life for Elgar was like. We live it in these continual states of transition between extremes, and the music is paralleling that. We might misquote Cezanne and say that the concerto was 'a harmony parallel to the living of a life': life as Elgar lived it, full of unfulfilled heartbreaking longings that exist alongside brash, almost vulgar public buoyancy.

Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the cadenza, where the two polarised emotions could be seen as hope and despair, battling it out between themselves, almost as if all that had gone before had (incredibly), left too many unanswered musical and existential questions. The implicit hope expressed in the windflower themes continually falters into despair - so close to despair that there are a couple of moments when the music undergoes a kind of temporary death, and there's a momentary fear that it may not recover, but just stop.

So what, then, is the 'soul' to which the famous dedication refers? Elgar would chuckle at our puzzling over that, wouldn't he?  You're right - it could be the Violin. It could be Windflower. It could be Elgar himself. It could be all of them - in fact I think it is. Musically, it's the violin; emotionally, it's Windflower; existentially, it's Elgar himself. Just as in the Enigma Variations he expresses himself through the friends musically pictured within, so in the Violin Concerto we might say that he expresses himself in three primary ways: through the Violin; through the idea of the yearned-for feminine; and through the existential uncertainties between his public and private life - uncertainties that caused him so much pain, but whose workings were the source of his finest inspirations.

[Luke]

Well it makes sense to me, by golly. We express ourselves in different ways, Luke, but I think the driving force is very similar. If I were to have a shot at identifying the underlying character, it would be related somehow to some sort of perpetually shifting polarisation. As you suggest, he is continually operating between extreme positions - extremes being understood in different ways. So you, here, contrast chunks of virtuosity and chunks of lyricism, not presented as separate, distinct passages, but interwoven. Now I'd say that is characteristic of this concerto; and in exactly the same way I'd talk about a similar interplay between masculine and feminine. Between public face and private. Between even, perhaps, manic and depressive. And exactly as you say - this is what life is like - and certainly what life for Elgar was like. We live it in these continual states of transition between extremes, and the music is paralleling that. We might misquote Cezanne and say that the concerto was 'a harmony parallel to the living of a life': life as Elgar lived it, full of unfulfilled heartbreaking longings that exist alongside brash, almost vulgar public buoyancy.

Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the cadenza, where the two polarised emotions could be seen as hope and despair, battling it out between themselves, almost as if all that had gone before had (incredibly), left too many unanswered musical and existential questions. The implicit hope expressed in the windflower themes continually falters into despair - so close to despair that there are a couple of moments when the music undergoes a kind of temporary death, and there's a momentary fear that it may not recover, but just stop.

So what, then, is the 'soul' to which the famous dedication refers? Elgar would chuckle at our puzzling over that, wouldn't he?  You're right - it could be the Violin. It could be Windflower. It could be Elgar himself. It could be all of them - in fact I think it is. Musically, it's the violin; emotionally, it's Windflower; existentially, it's Elgar himself. Just as in the Enigma Variations he expresses himself through the friends musically pictured within, so in the Violin Concerto we might say that he expresses himself in three primary ways: through the Violin; through the idea of the yearned-for feminine; and through the existential uncertainties between his public and private life - uncertainties that caused him so much pain, but whose workings were the source of his finest inspirations.

What a beautiful post. What a pleasure to read. Thank you so much for that, so much food for thought in there. This is what I love about the way you write, Alan - you often seem to have the key, in images and words, to what it really is that makes the music tick, and when one reads that sort of writing, the shock of recognition is so wonderful - 'Ah, so that's [at least part of] the reason why this music has this intangible efect on me!' It is the putting into words of something that is usually almost impossible to put into words; it's what a few of us try to do here, and is wonderful to read when it is manged. (Wilfrid Mellers is, for me, the writer who does this sort of thing most consitently and revelatorily, if that can be a word, FWIW)

[Luke]

Oh, BTW, I also put on the Vellingers/Lane in the Quintet today. Very nice indeed, very convincing (as you say, it's hard to find a recording that doesn't convince, though - I was certainly 100% sold already!). They were very tight; I'm not sure if it is a fast reading in clock time, but very often it felt it, in an entirely positive way - really vibrant, corruscating playing in theouter movements which brought things to life very effectively.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Alan's channeling of Edward, aided by the Venerable Luke, certainly has augmented my understanding of and love for Elgar's music... Thanks, gents.

[karlhenning]

Really enjoyed In the South this afternoon; I don't think I had ever listened to it closely before.

[Elgarian]

It is the putting into words of something that is usually almost impossible to put into words; it's what a few of us try to do here, and is wonderful to read when it is managed.

I felt much the same when I read your empassioned analysis of what you'd been listening to. I could tell that you'd written it as Ted Hughes always said poetry should (in the first instance) be written: that is, by not focusing on the words at all, but by focusing on the subject, and then just letting the words bubble out. Because, as Hughes promises - they will bubble out, if you give them space. And when they do (that is, under these special conditions), they don't fight each other (as they often do when we try to compose them consciously), but rather they create something full of energy and coherence that has the qualities of life that were inherent in the original subject.

I think it's fantastic that we can exchange thoughts like this - and understand each other - about something so abstract as a piece of music. It doesn't exactly 'explain' the music; rather, it allows us to look afresh at the music through someone else's eyes (well, ears, rather). The benefit is perceptive rather than intellectual. Good fun too!

[Luke]

Alan's channeling of Edward, aided by the Venerable Luke, certainly has augmented my understanding of and love for Elgar's music... Thanks, gents.

Venerable? Moi? First time I've been called that!

Alan - thanks!  I like that Hughes idea; it's how I feel music should be written too (how I try to write mine, as you say, 'at least at first'). How can music communicate at a more-than-surface level if it hasn't come from somewhere below the surface?

Of course, I won't take offence at 'I could tell that you'd written it...by not focusing on the words'    because I know and agree with exactly what you mean! And I know, too, that my writing can get lost sometimes, too, though the meaning is in there, struggling to get out! Usually...