LDV42

GARY HOFFMAN | LIÈGE ROYAL PHILHARMONIC | CHRISTIANARMING 25 If so, it was to no avail, for the premierewas a disaster: the conductorAlbert Coates monopolised the orchestra’s rehearsal time, barely leaving Elgar the opportunity for a read-through with the soloist Felix Salmond. The audience was taken aback by the work’s opening, with the cello alone, but also by the nostalgic tone, the sorrowful phrases of the Moderato, the lute-like pizzicatos of the Lento (which seem to evoke the art of the viol composers such as Tobias Hume) and the whimsy of theAllegromolto, the passages on the borderline of silence that run through the Adagio and the tempestuous intensity of the finale. The work disappeared from concert halls and remained little-known, despite Elgar’s recording of March 1928 with Beatrice Harrison. Finally it was Pablo Casals who gave it a new lease of life by recording it in London in 1945 under the direction of Adrian Boult. This work, in which nostalgia prevails over grandiloquence, seems to close the golden age of the great Romantic cello concertos, even though its melodic and thematic structure displays a kinship with the rhapsody; its intense poetry has rightly reminded some commentators of Brahms’ late opuses for piano. On 7 April 1920, Alice died. Could it be that the Concertowas her husband’s last portrait of her, following the depiction in the first of the ‘Enigma’ Variations?