Boult's Elgar - The Forgotten Recordings

Boult's Elgar - The Forgotten Recordings

ARIADNE 5037-2 (SOMM Recordings, CD, 2 discs)

AAD
mono/stereo
COMPILATION (14 March 2025)

Playing time: 78'10"
Tracks: 5 + 13
Booklet pages: 12
℗ 2025 SOMM Recordings
© 2025 SOMM Recordings
Main country of recording: United Kingdom
Country of manufacture: European Union
Received: 7 February 2025
This item is available to review

The continuing collaboration of SOMM Recordings and Lani Spahr has produced another release of long forgotten and neglected recordings, which highlight Adrian Boult's life-long championing of the music of Edward Elgar. The label remains grateful, as ever, to Spahr for resurrecting these lost treasures and for his sterling work on sound restoration.

On 17 February 1918, in wartime London, a twenty-eight-year-old Adrian Boult visited the home of Edward Elgar to discuss details for a performance of In the South that Boult was to conduct for the first time at Queen's Hall the following evening. In 1944, in the midst of another war, Boult would again conduct the concert overture in a broadcast performance with the BBC Orchestra. SOMM Recordings is proud to include this performance on its release, Boult's Elgar - The Forgotten Recordings.

Elgar had conducted the first performance of his Second Symphony at the Queen's Hall on 24 May 1911, and it was, by his own admission and according to Boult's description, 'really rather a flop'. Overshadowed by the success of the First Symphony, the Second had been received with polite restraint. After Boult conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in his first performance of the symphony on 16 March 1920, Elgar wrote to him, 'I send a word of thanks for your splendid conducting of the Sym: - I am most grateful to you for your affectionate care of it & feel that my reputation in the future is safe in your hands.' And so it proved to be. Boult went on to perform the symphony more than seventy times, and it was largely thanks to his advocacy that audiences started to warm to the work.

This present recording of the Second Symphony from SOMM, published on CD for the first time, was made by the Scottish National Orchestra in September 1963, a few months before Boult turned seventy-five. Nigel Simeone, author of Edward Elgar and Adrian Boult, characterizes in this recording 'an unerring sense of "rightness" in his choice of speeds, a phenomenal grasp of the broad structures of each movement, and playing of unflinching sincerity and conviction'.

Some of Boult's earliest conducting experience had been with choirs during his student years at Oxford. The second disc on this release includes BBC radio broadcasts from July 1967 of ten unaccompanied choral songs, composed by Elgar between 1907 and 1914, with Boult conducting the BBC Chorus.

This double CD also features three insightful interviews with Boult from the BBC. These include him talking with Elgar's daughter about the Enigma Variations and also his perceptions of working with Elgar on his Second Symphony and In the South.

 

 << Home              Latest CDs >>