No. 60 – December 2016 Address for Communications
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News In this issue ... Page Page Address for communications 2 Elgar Medal for Sir Mark Elder 13 Style Guide 2 Elgar Works 14 Keep in touch 4 Elgar Birthplace – the future 17 Letter from the Chairman 4 Letters to the Editors 17 Editorial 8 Branch Reports 22 From the Vice–Chairman 9 Branch Events 33 From the Secretary 10 Dates for your Diary 37 Treasurer’s notes 10 Hallé Orchestra Elgar Festival 52 From the Membership Secretary 12 Delius Society 52 Welcome to new Members 12 Crossword 54 No. 60 – December 2016 Address for Communications Contributions for the April 2017 issue of the Elgar Society News should be e–mailed to both the editors: Richard Smith: [email protected] Peter James: [email protected] Full contact details can be found on the back cover. The latest date for submissions for the April 2017 issue is 25 February 2017. Style Guide Abbreviations & contractions Contractions & familiar abbreviations: no full stop (Mr, Dr, BBC, OUP, am, pm, ie, eg) Abbreviations: add a full stop if needed for clarity or elegance (Op., No., J.S. Bach) Days: Mon, Tues, Weds, Thurs, Fri, Sat, Sun Months: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, June, July, Aug, Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec Capitals Chairman, Secretary and Branch of the Elgar Society in capitals, whether specific or general, and whether singular or plural. Dates & times Use the form 2 June 1857. Decades: 1930s, no apostrophe. 4.30pm (12hr clock, full stop, not colon); 12pm (not noon). E–mail Write as e–mail, not email. Foreign words In roman if well established in English (sic, crescendo), otherwise in italics. 2 Elgar Society News Style Guide Numbers Spell out up to and including twenty, then 21 etc in figures. No superscript for ordinal numbers (ie 1st, not 1st). Plurals No apostrophe (CDs, not CD’s) unless needed for clarity (eg mind your p’s and q’s). Possessives Apostrophe s after singular nouns ending in –s. With personal names that end in –s but are not naturally pronounced with an extra s: just add an apostrophe after the –s. Prices £3 (not £3.00). Quotations In single quotes; double quotes for quotes within quotes. Telephone numbers 01243 774557 (not 01243–774557). Three–digit area codes followed by eight–digit numbers (eg London numbers) as 020 7777 7777, not 0207 777 7777.Mobile phone numbers in the form 07123 456789. Titles Generic titles in roman (eg Violin Concerto); others in italics (eg Sea Pictures, the Musical Times); units within a longer work in single quotes (eg ‘Sanctus fortis’ from The Dream of Gerontius); nicknames in single quotes (eg ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, ‘Enigma’ Variations). No. 60 – December 2016 3 Keep in Touch Remember: you can keep up to date with the latest Elgarian news online at Facebook: www.facebook.com Twitter: www.twitter.com London Branch Account: https://twitter.com/ElgarLondon YouTube: www.youtube.com or, search for ‘Elgar Society’ or ‘Elgar Birthplace’. If you have details of a concert containing a work by Elgar, please notify us by e–mail at: [email protected] As we are less constrained by space on the Elgar website, wherever possible please remember to include : – The starting time, full address of the venue and an enquiry telephone number; – Composers of other works in the concert; and – The full names of all performers. Letter from the Chairman Dear Friends Since the AGM we have been busy on the Executive and Council. We have had two meetings of the Executive and they saw George Smart settle smoothly into his new role as the Society’s Honorary Secretary. He has had to fly from Glasgow to attend them in Nottingham so we are experimenting soon with a video–meeting of the five members the Executive, and that should prove interesting. 4 Elgar Society News Letter from the Chairman The Castle Bridge, Downton. Watercolour by Thomas Hearne (1744–1817). We have certainly been busy on the grants front. In 2016 we have re–adopted for a further five years Elgar’s Piano in the Cobbe Collection at £400pa. The Elgar in Performance Group, which comprises the Executive with Barry Collett and Martyn Marsh, considered about 35 applications in 2016 to support performances at home and abroad and granted 30 of them. The letters of appreciation we receive when the performances have taken place with our help are very gratifying. As I have noted before, the performances in Germany have been particularly noticeable over the last year or so and so we have been pushing the Elgar in Deutschland initiative particularly through the efforts of Geoff Scargill in collaboration with the Elgar Family Trust. Geoff and I met at the British Library to sort out some details about our biggest collaboration – the educational programme in Cologne culminating in a performance of The Kingdom in June 2017. Armed No. 60 – December 2016 5 Letter from the Chairman with support from the Executive, Geoff and I flew to Germany for a delightful and constructive meeting with the conductor, Thomas Neuhoff, and the Elgar animateur in Germany, Wolfgang–Armin Rittmeier. We sorted out arrangements for the Elgar Society to be present and, we hope, recruiting to the Society next June. After a very detailed and useful discussion, the Council endorsed the initiative at its meeting on 22 October and made the following decisions: • That the free membership in its present form be extended to members from abroad. • That Council changes the membership ‘offer’ for those living abroad to be electronic–only. • That the ES Abroad ‘offer’ comprises receipt of the Journal and the News, and free entry to the Birthplace. It further considered that strengthened ties with the Elgar Family Trust were desirable and welcomed proposals. The Council also noted the developing arrangements for Elgar Days in Worcester (organised by Worcester City Council) and approved moving the AGM to Sunday 4 June within the Cathedral precinct, discovered the Birthplace should be available and so anticipated the usual post–Evensong event should be held there. It was noted that West Midlands Branch would be arranging the other events during the weekend. It was on the recording front that we noted the greatest progress. At an Extraordinary Council Meeting in June, we decided to set aside a total of £20,000 for each of 2016 and 2017 to enable the following recordings to take place, which were on schedule. • John Knowles – a hitherto undiscovered recording of the Elegy (see last April’s News) with other rarities. • Three Recordings by Somm Records: Volume 1: Choral Items; Volume 2: Songs with Orchestra/Piano; Volume 3: Elgar and his Peers: Music for Military Band including the setting for choir and military band of With Proud Thanksgiving by Frank Winterbottom and Queen Alexandra’s Memorial Ode ‘So many true Princesses’. This was written by the Poet Laureate John Masefield and set to music for choir and orchestra by Elgar for the 6 Elgar Society News Letter from the Chairman unveiling of Queen Alexandra’s Memorial outside Marlborough House, in June 1932. Because of a subsequent change of plan, the accompaniment was re–arranged for military band and Elgar conducted the chorister children of the Choir of Westminster Abbey and the band in a performance of the Ode. The band parts have since been lost, so Somm has commissioned conductor Tom Higgins to make his own arrangement for military band. • To round off our recording initiatives, Mike Dutton is mining one of the most recent Complete Edition volumes and we are supporting Volume 1 of the Short Orchestral Works, to contain a few première recordings. I am looking forward immensely to listening to the recordings as they come out. To another matter – it would be remiss of me not to highlight that the companion edition of the Journal is the last to be edited by Martin Bird, so may I pay tribute to his superb five years at the helm and to thank him for what he has done for Elgar scholarship. I thank him also for the helping hand he has extended towards his successor, Meinhard Saremba. Finally, what about the music itself amongst all this activity? I have not heard many live performances of Elgar recently, but I can leave you with one of my happiest, most recent Elgarian activities (and hence the picture above). In late September I was tangentially involved with the Arcadia festival of chamber music, co–directed by the composer Eleanor Alberga and the violinist Tom Bowes, and I attended the concerts in churches near Ludlow. Can you imagine anything more wonderful than listening to fantastic performances of Elgar’s String Quartet and Piano Quintet, amongst Haydn, Schoenberg, Walton, Barber, Grob and Alberga, and all in the idyllic, sun–dappled Shropshire countryside? Definitely Arcadian, and even Paradise Regained. No. 60 – December 2016 7 Editorial There’s a well–known poem by Wendy Cope, ‘Bloody men are like bloody buses’, in which she observes that you wait for a year for either and then three come at once. The same could be said about Falstaff, probably the most neglected of all Elgar’s orchestral masterpieces. Yet on 20 January 2017 it will be performed simultaneously in London, conducted by Oliver Knussen, and in Carlisle under Sir Andrew Davis. Davis goes on to play it again in Manchester the next day and in Liverpool in May. Hats off to him. Hats off too to Sir Mark Elder for consistently programming lesser–known Elgar; and, amongst others, to north London’s Southgate Symphony Orchestra for playing the Third Symphony in July (see the London Branch report) and both Wand of Youth suites in their concert next April.