W. H. Reed’s Elgar As I Knew Him – Part 3

Throughout Billy Reed’s book Elgar As I Knew Him, first published in 1936, we get superb insights into the composer’s life, from how - with Reed’s own skill as a violinist — he managed to “organise” his magnificent Violin Concerto (a piece, for some reason, we seldom hear these days), with Reed trying out the difficult passages to see if they could actually be done. We also see Elgar as a man of many passions, one of which was for chemistry (with resultant explosions) with a fully equipped laboratory set-up in a garden shed; in fact Elgar patented an apparatus for producing sulphurated hydrogen known as the “Elgar S.H. Apparatus”. The shed (known as “The Ark”) was also used by Elgar and Reed to hide, from Lady Elgar, bottles of India Pale Ale they’d smuggled in from the local pub in a sack – all very Ealing Comedy, all very English.

And when you learn that Elgar, after a dinner party, liked nothing better than to entertain his guests with toys bought from Woolworth’s, you are suddenly very close to the heart of the man: to a man of fun (and childhood fun at that), fun that can be heard in all his music, but often darkened by periods of black depression that often accompanies the fun at a discreet distance.

All of this is in Reed’s book, and Elgar’s love of dogs, which was something he was only able to indulge in after Lady Elgar’s death in 1920, with Mina, a Cairn Terrier (he wrote a lovely piece of music named after her), and Marco, a Spaniel – plus, at one time another Cairn Terrier - becoming his inseparable companions, whose constant love, along with Bernard Shaw’s badgering, may have given Elgar the courage to accept the BBC’s commission to write a third symphony.

On page 169 of his book Reed gets round to the subject of the 3rd Symphony…

Before entering upon the description of this work, let me quote a letter I received from Bernard Shaw, which may act as an additional deterrent to anyone who may think that, after all, it is a tragedy that this symphony should remain unperformed, and that some other composer should take fragments and build them into some sort of practicable coherence: in short, as Elgar said, tinker with it.

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That excellent music critic David Mellor, has compiled a list of his top 10 classical CDs of 2006. I thought it would be worthwhile taking a look at them:

1. La Clemenza Di Tito, the Mozart opera, is favoured in two recordings, both excellent : the first by Sir Charles Mackerras, the other by Rene Jacobs.

2. Also by Mozart and conducted by Mackerras is the recital Tutto Mozart.

3. Best reissue is (again) Mozart’s Complete Piano Concertos by Murray Perahia.

4. Best instrumental is Stephen Hough’s Spanish Album, which is “a real connoisseur’s choice”.

5. Best Concerto is Vivaldi’s Violin Concertos, which presents five that have never been heard before, played by violinist, Giuliano Carmignola.

6. Best historical is Jascha Heifetz’s 1930’s recording of the Sibelius concerto, conducted Sir Thomas Beecham.

7. Best orchestral is Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony with Polish maestro Anthony Wit.

8. Best chamber is Martha Argerich And Friends with music from the 2005 Lugano Festival, including two Rachmaninov masterpieces.

9. A special award goes to label Lyrita, pioneers of off-the-beaten-track recordings of British music.

10. CD of the Year goes to the 1955 Bayreuth Ring, issued for the first time in four sets by Testament, and originally recorded by Decca.

A splendid top 10 indeed.

When Sir Paul’s tone Poem Standing Stone was first premiered, and then released as a CD in 1997, it attracted a very mixed reception, which is fair enough. In fact I rather like to see the musical purists get their underwear in a bit of a twist when they try to tell us how bad something is, how derivative, how shallow, how it sounds as if it has been written by a committee, and, how dare you step over the musical boundaries and try your hand at ’serious’ music. In other words elitism at its worst. And believe me if there was a decree from No 10 and the White House tomorrow that all music be left in the hands of the purists, then music, all music, would die very quickly, and good riddance because none of it would be worth listening to.

And McCartney’s Standing Stone is worth listening to, and more than once.

Sir Paul’s first recorded effort at ’serious’ composing (as if composing hundreds of popular songs was not serious for goodness sake) was his 1991 Liverpool Oratorio which I remember as a tremendously moving piece of work that quite naturally showed the influence of Elgar (who made the oratorio his own in the early 20th century), but to my ears much more that of Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, plus a good helping of John Tavener and Malcolm Arnold, who were, and are, masters of assimilation, as is McCartney - you only have to listen to Sgt Pepper, the early Wings recordings, and some recent solo McCartney, to understand what I’m getting at; and without assimilation art, any art, cannot move ahead, cannot be creative.

And it’s the same with Standing Stone, McCartney’s first real stab at a symphonic piece. It worked in October 1997 when it was premiered and released, and it worked last night when, with Hilary, I listened to it again.

This is what McCartney has to say about Standing Stone in the liner notes to the CD…

” I’ve spent much of the last four years composing what has now become my second large-scale classical work, the symphonic poem Standing Stone. Unlike the Liverpool Oratorio which features prominent roles for four solo singers, Standing Stone relies entirely on colours and effects drawn from the orchestral and choral forces. With no soloists to propel the “story” and to help keep me on track throughout the writing of about 75 minutes of music I wrote a poem in which I try to describe the way Celtic man might have wondered about the origins of life and the mystery of human existence…”

And it is there that we have the secret of this piece of wonderful music - that of man wondering what life is all about. It’s the same secret we discover when we look at Anthony Gormley’s 100 iron men looking out to sea from Crosby beach - their solitariness, their stillness and their fortitude. It is what we hear in this music, especially in Part 9, where McCartney introduces a melody of such simplicity and beauty that it almost breaks your heart (which has come from a good deal of contemplation and experience), and what we hear too in the music of Sir Malcolm Arnold who, like McCartney, was criticised by those damned purists for being popular. And the more I listen to Standing Stone the more I realise that Arnold has undoubtedly been a greater influence (consciously or subconsciously) than any other composer on McCartney’s symphonic music, but not in a negative sense. The underlying echoes of Arnold (Sir Paul might disagree) come through to me as a kind of homage to a man who shared many of Sir Paul’s ideals and beliefs, and, like Paul, wrote music from the heart.

Then it occurred to Hilary - who has recently started a campaign to save Gormley’s ‘Another Place’ at Crosby - that McCartney’s Standing Stone is effectively the soundtrack to Gormley’s magnificent work on that haunted, industrial, almost derelict beach, and that McCartney’s wonderfully evocative, emotional music must, somehow, be performed there.

Any thoughts on how we can make it happen?

Standing Stone, recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra, and conducted by Lawrence Foster, is available on EMI Classics (USA link or UK link).

Sir Paul McCartney’s latest classical work, Ecce Cor Meum, Behold My Heart, a work for chorus and orchestra, will be premiered on Friday 3rd of November at the Royal Albert Hall, London. It is also available on EMI Classics.

Steve Newman

The New York Times has a piece today on a short video over on YouTube in which Pachelbel’s Canon is played with extraordinary virtuosity on an electric guitar by a complete unknown called, Jeong-Hyun Lim.

“The piece that funtwo played with mounting dexterity was an exceedingly difficult rock arrangement of Pachelbel’s Canon, the composition from the turn of the 18th century known for its solemn chord progressions and its overexposure at weddings. But this arrangement, attributed on another title card to JerryC, was anything but plodding: it required high-level mastery of a singularly demanding maneuver called sweep-picking.

“Over and over the guitarist’s left hand articulated strings with barely perceptible movements, sounding and muting notes almost simultaneously, and playing complete arpeggios through a single stroke with his right hand. Funtwo’s accuracy and velocity seemed record-breaking, but his mouth and jawline — to the extent that they were visible — looked impassive, with none of the exaggerated grimaces of heavy metal guitar heroes. The contrast between the soaring bravado of the undertaking and the reticence of the guitarist gave the 5-minute, 20-second video a gorgeous solemnity.”

Hear it on The Blog Herald.