Sir Edward ELGAR (1857-1934 )

Symphony No.3 based on sketches elaborated by Anthony Payne Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paul Daniel

NAXOS 8.554719
[54:59] budget-price

by Jonathan Yungkans

Introduction
Leave it to George Bernard Shaw to not take "no" for an answer. For years, he doggedly tried persuading his friend Edward Elgar to write a third symphony - and for years, Elgar just as stubbornly refused, maintaining that he was "a broken man" after the death of his wife Alice in 1920. But eventually, Shaw won out. After orchestrating the funeral march from Chopin's second piano sonata for the BBC early in 1932, Elgar was asked by a critic if an orchestration of the entire sonata would constitute a symphony. Elgar replied that he would just as soon write a symphony himself.

The press got wind of the story, Shaw persuaded the BBC to offer Elgar (right) a commission for a new symphony, and the composer plunged furiously into work. Ideas progressed rapidly until he was diagnosed with terminal cancer the following year. With that prognosis, he stopped composing, and at one point suggested that the 130 pages of sketches for the symphony be destroyed.

The sketches survived, locked in the British Library; however, it was assumed that all hopes of completing the symphony had died with the composer.

Enter Anthony Payne, a British composer, writer and broadcaster. In 1972, Payne began examining the sketches of the symphony that had been published in W.H. Reed's Book Elgar As I Knew Him (ironically, a book that Shaw encouraged Reed to write after Elgar's death), and was impressed with the vitality and force of the music. At that time, Payne says, contemplating the sketches, and what Elgar would perhaps have done with them, were no more than an intermittent hobby; years at a time would pass without his glancing at them.

However, in 1993, the BBC asked Payne to put the sketches together into some order for a broadcast lecture on them. The BBC sent photocopies of all the sketches, including those not published in Reed's book, and within a year, Payne had completed the scherzo and adagio.

Meanwhile, the Elgar estate, which controlled the copyright to the sketches, became trepidacious about anyone continuing work on them, and thus violating their great uncle's deathbed wish. Gradually, however, the family eased its prohibition, saying that they had no objection to a radio program about the sketches as long as Payne's efforts were not alluded to.

Accordingly, Payne recorded a talk for the BBC in March 1995, which was later released on compact disc as an attachment to BBC Music magazine. The talk proved that the sketches were perhaps not as "nebulous" or "woefully lacking in cohesion" as Reed had maintained in his book, stirring interest in what could be gleaned from them.

Later that year, with the realization that the copyright on Reed's book, and the sketches published in it, would expire in 2005, with anyone having the legal right to use them, they commissioned Payne to complete the symphony. The piece was premiered by Andrew Davis and the BBC Symphony on 15 February 1998, and a CD of the work by those forces was issued on NMC 53 (cover pictured on the right).

The bottom line about the new symphony is, how much does it truly sound like Elgar, and how much have the composer's intentions transcended the fragmentary nature of the material he left? Some reconstructions, such as Deryck Cooke's of Mahler's Symphony No.10, fulfill the job admirably. Others, such as Alexander Nemtin's work on Scriabin's Preparatory Act, are more debatable.

Payne has done an incredible job of structuring the sketches and bringing to them a sound and form that Elgar himself may have approved - no mean feat, as Payne says Elgar's working method was to jump from movement to movement as the spirit took him, as though shaping the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle, before assembling the whole composition. Some may debate that the symphony is not as memorable as its two predecessors, but there is still much that is striking and of great interest, and we would be much the poorer without it.

Above all, the symphony illustrates that Elgar not only showed little, if any, diminution in creative powers at the twilight of his life, but that he was not afraid of letting his ideas travel new directions. Take, for instance, the opening theme - a series of driving open fifths in the lower strings that is very shortly echoed by the brass. It is bolder than what we have come to expect from Elgar, leaner and more athletic, but this is one of the few sections that the composer actually finished. (He had also commented that the new work would sound much different than the other two symphonies, so we can be doubly sure what we are hearing is authentic.)

A lyrical second theme contrasts nicely, and is developed with the first theme in a more straightforward but no less compelling manner than either of the other symphonies - again, as Elgar had previously said he would do.

The scherzo, whose thematic material Elgar took from his incidental music for Lawrence Binyon's play King Arthur, is charming, lightly scored, but carries a faint undertone of Mahlerian unease, giving us both a break from the dynamism of what has preceded it and a slight preparation for the adagio that follows. The first two chords of that adagio, as Elgar (left) wrote to Ernest Newman in December 1933, "open up some vast bronze doors into something strangely unfamiliar."

The music, almost Waltonian in its impact, carries the chill of a winter wind over a graveyard, and one could imagine hearing it accompanying the ghost of Hamlet's father as he tells his son about his murder. Bleak and searing in the depths it plumbs, this movement is the most visionary of the four, as well as the one that sounds the least traditionally Elgarian, but is no less affecting for that.

With the finale, we are back on more familiar ground - a bold fanfare and rushing strings introduce a march, followed by one of the great striding themes for which Elgar was famous. In this movement, Payne says he faced his greatest challenge, as Elgar did not clearly indicate how the symphony would end. Payne decided to "dare all in honor of Elgar's unpredictability," using music from "The Waggon Passes" of the Nursery Suite. The effect is potent, haunting and, again, visionary.

The Recording
So how does the Naxos recording stack up to Davis and the BBC Symphony on NMC? Actually, quite well. Paul Daniel and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra impart the dynamism of the opening movement better than Davis and the BBC, yet ease up more for the second subject, which lends it a more yearning quality. Daniel and Davis start the scherzo well, but Davis bogs down where Daniel stays light and elegant.

In the Adagio, Davis is darker than Daniel but too static; Daniel becomes the clear winner here, keeping things moving while not slighting the expressiveness of the music. On the other hand, Daniel rushes headlong in the finale, losing much of the movement's majesty, especially in that striding second theme. Here, Davis gets the weight and grandeur just right.

"Can we really ignore this brave last testimony from one of our greatest creative artists?"

There is also a companion disc to the Davis/BBC performance, issued separately as NMC 52, which presents the sketches as Elgar left them and gives a more detailed lecture than the BBC presentation.

The Naxos recording, though excellent, and in many ways better than Davis and the BBC, should not be the last word on the Elgar Third. Leonard Slatkin has performed the work, and one hopes that Yan Pascal Tortellier, who conducted the orchestral excerpts with the BBC Symphony for Payne's radio lecture, would take a crack at it, as well as perhaps Vernon Handley or Andre Previn.

Elgar himself told John Reith of the BBC, while working on the symphony, "… up to the present, the symphony is the strongest thing I have put to paper." And as Payne concluded in his BBC talk, "Can we really ignore this brave last testimony from one of our greatest creative artists?"

Bibliography:
Golding, Robin: Liner notes for Naxos 8.554719 (2000).

Hecht, Roger: Review of Elgar Symphony #3, Naxos 8.554719. American Record Guide, 63:4 (July/August 2000), 119-120.

Hecht, Roger: Review of Elgar Symphony #3, NMC 53. American Record Guide, 61:5 (September/October 1998), 149-152.

Matthews, Colin: "Elgar/Payne Symphony No. 3: A Justification". http://www.elgar.org/3symph3b.htm (1997). Also used as liner notes for NMC 53.

Payne, Anthony: "Elgar/Payne Symphony No. 3: An Introduction". http://www.elgar.org/3symph3e.htm (1997). Also used as liner notes for NMC 53.

Payne, Anthony: "Sketches from Symphony No. 3". BBC Music, IV: 2 (1995), compact disc insert.

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