Review by Edward Clark

Elgar Sinfonia of London
Adrian Brown conducts:
 
Parry ‘Blest Pair of Sirens’
Corps Symphony no.2
Elgar ‘The Light of Life’

with the London Chorus

Sunday, June 25th 2023, St Andrew’s, Holborn, London

This impressive concert of English music, old and new, was given by the Elgar Sinfonia of London, conducted by Adrian Brown, at St. Andrews Church, Holborn, London on Sunday 25th June 2023 at 4.30pm.

First came Blest Pair of Sirens by Hubert Parry. It is not his best choral work (easily beaten by I was Glad) but  it still generates an enjoyable sound, bought out by the choir and orchestra.

The Symphony No.2 by Ronald Corp was a premiere performance by its dedicatee, Adrian Brown. Its sound world, strictly diatonic, harks back to the 1960’s era of similar works by Robert Still and Gordon Jacob with Malcolm Arnold making an appearance in the finale. The key is its melodic impulse in each of the four movements, the most interesting and individual being the finale, very much in the Arnold style of mild disruption.

The performance was very successful under Brown’s attentive baton and it is a gift to our many splendid Youth Orchestras seeking new repertoire that causes no offence but produces a feeling of well-being due to its ability to give pleasure and sustenance in our troubled world.

 

The main attraction to many in the audience was Elgar’s early (1896) oratorio, The Light of Life (Lux Christi). The subject is Jesus’s restoration of the blind man’s sight, as recounted in the Gospel According to St John. It is an extreme  rarity in our concert halls and Brown deserves our great thanks for bringing it to life in such a vivid way. It is let down by the, prosaic libretto, cobbled together by the Revd Edward Capel-Cure but the music is surely a gift to our choral societies wanting to be a little more adventurous than the choral masterpieces that followed. There are many prophetic passages which generate admiration for the emerging genius that was to flower later. The four soloists; Nicola Ihnatowicz, soprano, Lucy Goddard, alto, James Botcher, tenor and Freddie Crowley, baritone combined well in the passages where more than one was singing and the London Chorus sang with emotional gusto.

The Light of Life carries its origins in the style of the times, portentous but also tender in places; it contains many moments of true Elgarian feeling so well on display under Brown’s often impassioned performance

Edward Clark

Review by Edward Clark Musical Opinion

Elgar Sinfonia of London
Adrian Brown conducts A Tribute to Finzi and Vaughan-Williams

Sunday, June 26, 2022 St Andrew’s Holborn

This invigorating concert was given by the Elgar Sinfonia of London conducted by Adrian Brown at St Andrew’s Church, Holborn, London on Sunday 26 June 2022 at 4.30pm. The soloist was Indira Grier.

Elgar’s early Froissart Overture perhaps outstays its welcome in purist terms but the warm and welcome tunes that are displayed and developed throughout provide an opportunity to bask in the early Elgarian idiom, which is allied to the sounds heard later in the Pomp and Circumstance Marches. Brown allowed us to hear this celebratory music to best effect and his players projected the ceremonial splendour  to warm our hearts.

Gerald Finzi’s Cello Concerto, a late work, which he heard for the first time on his deathbed, gives the lie to a reputation of writing mainly miniatures at the cost of mastering bigger canvases. In three substantial movements the middle one contains many beauties of melody and warm sonorities and , alone deserves a place in the sun. Indira Grier was a splendid soloist, at home equally in the harsh dissonances in the first movement , the glorious embellishment of melodies in the slow movement and in the playful interplay in the finale.

Vaughan Williams magnificent Fifth Symphony was given one the of the best performances I have heard; dignified, passionate in places and controlled by a mind which knows how to extract the expressive nature in the music. The result was to place this most English of all composers at the top of the pantheon of all composers since Thomas Tallis.

The haunting uncertainty that launches this masterwork was constantly disrupted by hearing tonal and modal music side by side causing a disruptive effect that undermines the supposed calmness in the music. Only when the bright sunshine broke through the church window onto this critic at the coda was there a sense of arrival to a calm resolution of earlier struggles. And I am not normally superstitious!

Edward Clark                     

Review by Andrew Neill

Elgar Sinfonia of London
Adrian Brown conducts an Elgar Celebration
Janice Watson, Mezzo Soprano

Sunday, October 24 2021, St Andrew’s, Holborn, London

Music by Edward Elgar:

Polonia, Op. 76
Canto Popolare (In Moonlight) for small orchestra
Sea Pictures, Op 37
Crown if India (Suite), Op. 66
Grania and Diarmid, Op. 42: ‘There are seven that pull the thread’
Overture, Cockaigne, Op. 40

 

Sir Adrian Boult was right when he suggested the need for an Elgar Society in 1950. Then you might hear in concert, from time to time, The Dream of Gerontius, Enigma Variations and the Cello Concerto. Anything else required a diligent search though the concert announcements in the more serious newspapers and periodicals and a difficult journey to an out of the way venue. Elgar’s music was largely ignored, misunderstood and even viewed with contempt by some who should have known better. The Society was duly formed in 1951 but what gave it the boost to become the largest composer society in the country was the formation of its London Branch in 1971. Chaired by the late Douglas Guest -then Master of the Choristers and Organist at Westminster Abbey  –  the branch began a series of meetings and events which now exceed 400 in number. In those early days speakers who remembered the composer such as Yehudi Menuhin and Wulstan Atkins talked of their memories as well as about aspects of Elgar’s music. Paul Tortelier lit up one meeting although the intellectual weight of Hans Keller’s arguments were largely lost on the audience of another! In those days, musical illustrations were either given with the support of a reel-to-reel recorder or a record turntable; now we benefit from CDs and Powerpoint. However the message remains the same.

 

So it was that the branch, 50 years young, decided to celebrate its birthday with an all-Elgar concert. The programme chosen comprised both rarities – which even the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic Elgarians in the audience are likely never to have heard in live performance – together with the familiar Sea Pictures and Cockaigne overture. In the subtle splendour of St Andrew’s Church, Holborn, the Elgar Sinfonia of London was conducted by Adrian Brown[1]. Adrian’s understanding of Elgar’s music was reflected last year in the award of the Elgar medal and his conducting showed both passion and an impressive insight into the ebb and flow of the music. With him in charge, there was never any risk of the evening becoming monotonous or, alternatively, of the feast of music becoming over-rich.

 

The long arm of Covid had not finished with us yet; at the last moment Diana Moore, tested positive for the infection. We were fortunate indeed that Janice Watson was able to take her place. She had to face the additional challenge of singing in the presence of Dame Janet Baker, a Vice-President of the Society. She sang Sea Pictures beautifully and the circumstances generated a rapport between her and the audience which made her performance particularly special. Her knowledge of the mixture of the subtle and 

 

[1] The date is at the top of the review so doesn’t need to be repeated.

 

vigorous changes in Elgar’s music meant that she was wonderfully relaxed, allowing the texts to be heard and for her to balance her voice with the orchestra. [This was particularly remarkable given the inevitable shortness of rehearsal time][2]. After the performance, Dame Janet became the latest recipient of the Elgar medal. In a characteristically gracious speech she recalled her own singing of Sea Pictures and was warm in her praise of Janice’s singing.

The concert had begun with Polonia – Elgar’s tribute to a divided Poland in the First World War. This remarkable work contains stirring Polish themes, Elgar’s own music and quotations from Chopin and Paderewski and ending with Poland’s National Hymn. [Add a sentence about the performance itself?]

 

What followed was a contrast. Most of those who attended would have known Elgar’s In the South with its beautiful viola solo and some the version of the ‘Canto Popolare’ in the form of the song ‘In Moonlight’ to words by Shelley. Only recently has a concert version, orchestrated by Elgar, been discovered. This was an eye and ear opener: five minutes of Elgar at his most subtle, his use of the horns in particular bringing a warmth of the Mediterranean to the afternoon.

 

Some now find the music Elgar wrote for the Masque The Crown of India celebrating the 1911 crowning of King George V Emperor of India an embarrassment. However, Elgar was a man of his time and any embarrassment cannot tell us anything about the merits of the music. So it was good to hear the suite that he compiled from that work. The music ranges from the most exotic with tuned gongs and a ‘kitchen sink’ of percussion to an intermezzo of great subtlety. The exquisite solo violin of the leader, Ryo Koyama, in the intermezzo perhaps turned our thoughts from the plains of India to Elgar’s Severnside! Janice Watson then returned to perform another little known gem, the song ‘There are seven that pull the thread’ from Elgar’s 1901 music for the Irish play Grania and Diarmid. This song is all too short and formed another marked contrast: in this case to the ‘March of the Mogul Emperors’ which preceded it.

 

Fittingly for a concert to celebrate the birthday of the London branch, the concert ended with Elgar’s tribute to ‘London Town’, his concert overture Cockaigne. Splendidly done, its many episodes were delineated clearly and its happy peroration rounded off a memorable concert. The Elgar Sinfonia of London seem to go from strength to strength. They clearly love this repertoire and are skilled at playing both ppp and fff!

 

If Elgar was one hero of the day, Adrian Brown was the other. He had prepared the music and his players brilliantly and gave us a concert which was not only unique but a very special way of celebrating an organisation which has done so much to ensure Elgar’s music is heard in its glory now around the world.

[2] I would be minded not to say this.

 

Andrew Neill

Source: http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_concert_review.php?id=15974

Review by Edward Clark Musical Opinion

Elgar Sinfonia of London
Adrian Brown conducts British Tone Poems

Sunday, June 27, 2021 St Andrew’s Holborn

The Elgar Sinfonia of London

 

This concert was a welcome return to live music making for the players of this notable orchestra under the baton of its founder, Adrian Brown. As it happens, we both returned to hearing live music through the same conduit; it was Adrian Brown and his orchestra that I last attended in concert before lockdown all those months ago. It was marvellous to be back although the venue changed. This concert took place at St. Andrew’s Church, Holborn, London on Sunday 27th June 2021 at 4.30pm.

Brown chose three master works that, arguably, showed each composer at the pinnacle of their careers.

First came the Overture: The Land of the Mountain and the Flood by Hamish MacCunn. He wrote it at the early age of 19 so it may be presumptuous to claim it as the composer’s finest work. The truth is we rarely hear it in concert but it does now receive regular broadcasts on BBC R3 and Classic FM. I am unaware of any other work of his that comes near to the popularity of this lovely Overture so presume it really is a one hit wonder in his career, albeit a very early one. Brown certainly believes in its merits and gave a loving, forthright performance helped by some splendid playing by the orchestra, in particular the brass section, which gave heed to its excellence throughout the concert.

There followed an undoubted masterpiece by Frederick Delius, his glorious Violin Concerto, a work so rapt in its intimacy that any live concert seems to be an intrusion on the inner world of the composer. Here we had the good fortune of a late replacement for the indisposed Sasha Rozhdestvensky, Michael Foyle, who became Professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London in 2016, the youngest violinist appointed in the institution’s 200-year history. He is certainly an excellent violinist and I hope he will keep this concerto in his repertoire. For such an effusive and pliant work, he needs to get a little closer to the spirit Delius shows us through his tightly controlled thematic plan where melodies, once heard, are continually developed through subtle transformations so that when heard for the last time each becomes a representative for the ultimate source of ecstasy that seems to be the goal of the composer. He should be more passionate in his approach and give more of himself in the spirit of the many beauties we hear in this extended and rhapsodic work. The recorded examples of Albert Sammons and Jean Pougnet display the gaol that Michael Foyle and, indeed, any violinist needs to aim for. If the soloist was a little reticent then no qualms were heard in the sumptuous accompaniment achieved by the careful guidance of Brown with his willing players. The sounds were both beautiful and exultant.

So to Elgar’s masterpiece, Falstaff, written in 1913, after the disappointing premiere of the Second Symphony which received a luke-warm reception the year before. Both now are, of course, heard as central achievements in Elgar’s output. It is the added freedom of following a story line that helped Elgar to write such a graphic and easy to understand work. The quiet ending of the Second Symphony perplexed many listeners but Falstaff is rich in atmosphere and events that are easy to follow and grasp. Brown took his opportunity to seize the moment and allow his players full reign in showing just how good they are at interpreting the many felicities in this score. It was a truly heart-warming performance with the central character dominating at all times. The end was particularly moving with the old boy dying to the tune of a solo clarinet followed by a drum roll foretelling the first musical motif from the beginning leading to the final pizzicato that sounds so redolent of the same ending of another hero dying in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.

Brown chose to play Nimrod as his final act of the occasion. I take that to be a fitting tribute to the recently departed Anthony Payne, who bestowed the Elgar Medal on Adrian Brown at the last concert before lockdown which I attended and that which he conducted, none other that Tony Payne’s wonderful reconstruction of Elgar’s Third Symphony.

Edward Clark                     

 

Review by Edward Clark Musical Opinion

Elgar Sinfonia of London
Adrian Brown conducts The Elgar Legacy

Sunday, March 8, 2020 St John’s, Waterloo, London

This concert, given by the Elgar Sinfonia of London, conducted by Adrian Brown and given on Sunday 8 March at St John’s Church, Waterloo, received a capacity audience when a small one could have been expected due to the coronavirus situation.

The reason for such enthusiasm was the welcome recognition of Brown’s Elgarian credentials through his being awarded the Elgar Medal at the end of the concert. To reinforce the award Brown ended the concert with a heartfelt performance of the Third Symphony by Elgar elaborated by Anthony Payne. It was Payne who made the award and both musicians can be thanked for allowing sketches left by Elgar to be used and performed for such a successful endeavour, both through the score and the performance.

The orchestra warmed to its task by projecting the music with real purpose, through four movements all put together from varying degrees of sketches for a Third Symphony left unfinished by Elgar.  

Brown produced both effulgent tone when needed in the more ceremonial moments and the warmest, softest sounds in places that now exist in all their grandeur in this near miraculous score.

From the other end of Elgar’s life, the concert opened in full noblimente style with the Imperial March composed in 1897. It allowed the orchestra to begin the concert with full-hearted enthusiasm.

Brown often revives English works that have dropped out of fashion. No better description can be made of the Piano Concerto by John Ireland; once a favourite of performers and audiences, this highly emotional (think Rachmaninov in places) concerto received a suitably virtuoso performance from Rustam Khanmurzin who played it from memory.

Despite our national woes this concert lifted the spirits for all who were there to pay tribute to one of Great Britain’s finest conductors and composers.       

Review by Robert Matthew-Walker

Elgar Sinfonia of London
Adrian Brown conducts an Elgar programme at St John’s Waterloo – Music in the Shadow of World War One

Sunday, November 25, 2018 St John’s, Waterloo, London

The debut programme of a newly-constituted orchestra in London always brings pre-concert enquiries, not least the question “Does our capital city need another orchestra?”. In purely numerical terms, perhaps not, for London’s many full-time professional orchestras, alongside those attached to its major music colleges as well as the semi-professional and youth orchestras that concertize regularly, must outnumber those of any city on the planet.

Yet London concert programmes are not (or rather should not be) about how many orchestras there are; they should be about orchestras choosing to perform worthwhile music which is rarely given, alongside works from the standard repertoire.

As we are in Great Britain, it behoves such orchestras to play a fair amount of works by British composers, hopefully from the large body of eminently valid orchestral music that has been, for quite a few decades now, almost totally ignored by our more permanently-established state-funded orchestras, forever chasing the same clique of ‘international’ soloists and conductors, many of whom are indeed fine artists, but whose ‘international’ standing prevents them from investigating, let alone performing, quite magnificent British works which lie unperformed on publishers’ shelves from one decade to the next. It is no use expecting a foreign thirty-something soloist or conductor to arrive on these shores with a clutch of British masterpieces in their repertoire bag.

Nor are we talking about ‘neglected composers’ of whom, in the pantheon of British concert music, there are many whose music was once regularly heard at the Proms until quite recent times, but whose works have seemingly been thrown aside in the recent chases after fashion – at heart a profoundly inartistic search – for, example, ‘youth’, female or ethnic composers, or whatever else grabs the headlines in a socially justifiable rather than artistically worthwhile sense, and hopefully puts bums on seats.

What we are talking about is in many ways a consequence of the deliberate destruction of the understanding of art music in our educational system, which has led to a great swathe of fine music by native composers being ignored, and generations of young people growing up in ignorance of what is, after all, their inheritance and their country’s legacy. Whilst during these past four years the centenary of World War One has been the peg on which many concert programmes have been hung, such programmes have almost always been made up of music by British composers. Patriotic music by, say, German composers, equally inspired by their country’s sufferings in the Great War, has been totally neglected. So it was with something of a jolt that one contemplated this inaugural programme of the Elgar Sinfonia of London.

Clearly, the Elgar Sinfonia is going to play Elgar’s music, and before anyone claims that his orchestral music is often played, there are quite a few fine and characteristic works by him that are hardly ever heard. Adrian Brown was a long-term pupil of Sir Adrian Boult: with regard to Elgar’s music he could not have had a more sympathetic mentor. In addition, Brown is still the only British conductor to have reached the finals of the Herbert von Karajan conducting competition. Brown’s technique is admirable; his experience is wide and profound, and we heard ample evidence of those factors during this exceptional programme.

As if to justify my opening remarks, the large church of St John’s Waterloo was packed. We were rewarded by performances of high artistic merit.

 

Elgar’s sole ballet score, The Sanguine Fan, opened proceedings. Ballet music (at least, when this work was written, early in 1917) is intended to accompany dancing. It is not designed to be listened to studiously in a concert hall, although the musical worth of such scores often make them eminently suitable for concert use. During the Great War, Elgar found himself more and more drawn to dramatically-themed works either for, or accompanying, stage performance or for dramatic recitation in concert. The Sanguine Fan throughout is genuine Elgar (it could hardly be otherwise), and although the score contains many echoes of earlier masterpieces, it is certainly worth hearing by itself.

But The Sanguine Fan is no throwback to late-Victoriana: the dramatic theme of the ballet is neoclassical. Written ten years before Stravinsky’s Apollo, the story is more dramatic than abstract, and Elgar’s orchestra – again, whilst not Straussian – is twice the size of the string orchestra Stravinsky called for; nor, continuing the Stravinsky parallels, is the music of The Sanguine Fan (the title has absolutely nothing to do with the archaic Greek story) as ‘incidental’ to the stage proceedings as it is in, say, Pulcinella.

The Sanguine Fan – as it appeared on this occasion – is a fascinating and surely a most important score in Elgar’s theatre music, and also in its relationships to his earlier concert masterpieces. The one work of Elgar’s to which it bears the closest aspects is Falstaff – both are narrative scores, with subtle thematic transformations, but the music of The Sanguine Fan, of course, permits no longueurs, although, as with all genuine ballet music, it has moments of contemplative relaxation.

Such was the commitment and power of this performance that one became convinced, early on, that Elgar did not approach his task as a routine undertaking. There is some eminently worthwhile – and, perforce, unfamiliar – music here, and one could hardly have expected a more engrossing account than Brown obtained.

From the unknown to the familiar: Elgar’s Cello Concerto, with Daniel Benn as soloist, followed. I have not encountered this cellist before, but I have a mental note to seek him out in future. Benn’s was a totally engrossing performance of considerable musical insight, sensitivity and full technical command.

Elgar composed a number of works during World War One which were inspired by the conflict, including three dramatic recitations with orchestral accompaniment to words by the Belgian-born, anglophile poet Émile Cammaerts. Of those works, the second, Une Voix dans le Désert, is the most theatrical, for, in addition to the male reciter, a soprano soloist (a young girl) sings an extended setting of a poem ‘Quand nos bourgeons se rouvriront’ (When the spring returns), interspersed between the lone man observing the destruction lying before him, and the peaceful future to which her song looks forward.

It is a remarkably effective work, and is certainly the most significant of Elgar’s three orchestra-accompanied recitations. Naturally, perhaps, its interest remains almost wholly rhetorical, but there is also much musical interest as was revealed in this performance. With the fine narrator Joe Shefer in the pulpit, and Nicola Ihnatowicz to the left of the conductor, the work made a striking and atmospherically moving impression, Elgar’s myriad orchestration capturing both the scene before us and the hoped-for future pacification with considerable imagination.

Enigma Variations returned us to the familiar. Although dating from fifteen years before the War began, the use of the ninth variation, ‘Nimrod’, at commemorative events brought the programme to a suitable end, the newly-formed orchestra coping admirably with the masterly orchestration and Brown shaping the individual variations in excellent character. This was a most successful debut concert by a very good orchestra.

Source: http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_concert_review.php?id=15974