≥ ELGAR SEA PICTURES POLONIA POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE MARCHES 1–5 SIR MARK ELDER ALICE COOTE SIR EDWARD ELGAR (1857–1934) SEA PICTURES, OP.37 1. Sea Slumber-Song (Roden Noel) .......................................................... 5.15 2. In Haven (C. Alice Elgar) ........................................................................... 1.42 3. Sabbath Morning at Sea (Mrs Browning) ........................................ 5.47 4. Where Corals Lie (Dr Richard Garnett) ............................................. 3.57 5. The Swimmer (Adam Lindsay Gordon) .............................................5.52 ALICE COOTE MEZZO SOPRANO 6. POLONIA, OP.76 ......................................................................................13.16 POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE MARCHES, OP.39 7. No.1 in D major .............................................................................................. 6.14 8. No.2 in A minor .............................................................................................. 5.14 9. No.3 in C minor ..............................................................................................5.49 10. No.4 in G major ..............................................................................................4.52 11. No.5 in C major .............................................................................................. 6.15 TOTAL TIMING .....................................................................................................64.58 ≥ MUSIC DIRECTOR SIR MARK ELDER CBE LEADER LYN FLETCHER WWW.HALLE.CO.UK 2 | ≥ ELGAR EDWARD ELGAR (1857-1934) glissandi and entrancing woodwind solos. ‘In Haven’, to use Alice Elgar’s Sea Pictures, OP.37 words, is lightly scored and was the first of the songs to be composed With the exception of ‘In Haven’, this cycle of songs was composed – as ‘Love Alone Shall Stay’ (lute song) for voice and piano in 1897 in July 1899 while Elgar was at his beloved Herefordshire cottage, (published a year later). The ‘Capri’ of the subtitle is subtly suggested by Birchwood. In the previous month he had achieved his first major the siciliano-like rhythm. triumph in London, with the first performance of theEnigma Variations. In ‘Sabbath Morning at Sea’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s religious Sea Pictures had been commissioned by the Norwich Festival and was ecstasy aboard ship brings a solemn mood: the singer’s recitative- first performed there in October 1899 with Clara Butt as soloist and like opening turning into impassioned melody is a strong pointer to Elgar conducting. ‘She sang really well’, Elgar wrote, noting also that Gerontius’s vocal part. At the start of the fourth verse, the first song is she had appropriately ‘dressed like a mermaid’. The song cycle was quoted on the lower strings. This ‘Nimrod’-like grandeur is followed, as in repeated in London two days later, and two of the songs (with piano the Enigma Variations, by lightness and grace in ‘Where Corals Lie’, given accompaniment) were sung to Queen Victoria at Balmoral within a a deliciously lilting accompaniment. It has become the best-loved song fortnight. Their popularity was thus assured, and the cycle was one of the five, perhaps because it gave Elgar scope to express passionate of the few works on which the composer considered he received a yearning for the unattainable. With half an eye on The Flying Dutchman, satisfactory financial return in those years. Elgar’s ‘The Swimmer’ plunges into a stormy sea and comes up with With his wide knowledge of literature, Elgar took immense care in a splendid rolling theme as he breasts the waves. In the more relaxed choosing the five poems. Whether or not they are great poetry is central section, when the singer recalls ‘heights and hollows of fern and immaterial: one cannot now imagine them apart from the music. Of the heather’ a quotation from ‘Where Corals Lie’ is gently murmured by the poets, Roden Noel, son of the Earl of Gainsborough, published several oboe. After that the music gathers force for the impressive ending. books of verse and a life of Byron. Richard Garnett was, for nearly 50 years, on the staff of the British Museum, becoming Keeper of Polonia, Symphonic PRELUDE, OP.76 Printed Books. Adam Lindsay Gordon was born in the Azores, settled in It is time someone spoke up for Polonia. Usually dismissed as a Australia and shot himself in disappointment over an unsuccessful claim pot-pourri of Polish tunes strung together as a tribute to Poland’s to a family estate in Scotland. Mrs. Browning and Alice Elgar scarcely contribution to the Allied cause in the First World War, what you will need any introduction. hear is a tone-poem lasting nearly 15 minutes. True, Elgar quotes Polish Elgar was stimulated by the five poems in much the same way as he was tunes and Chopin, but the quotations are stitched into the texture with by O’Shaughnessy’s ‘The Music Makers’. Several deliberate allusions to skill and sensitivity. He had done his homework. Elgar thought highly some of his other works are embedded in the orchestral texture, and the enough of the piece to give it an opus number and he conducted the first enchanting theme of ‘Where Corals Lie’ derives from a quadrille written performance in the Queen’s Hall, London, on 8 July 1915. Polonia was for his asylum band at Powick 20 years earlier. Mahler, one of the few commissioned by the Polish conductor and composer Emil Mlynarski other contemporary composers of orchestral song cycles, conducted and is dedicated to ‘Mon ami I. Paderewski’ (Ignacy Jan Paderewski the Sea Pictures (excluding No.5) in New York in 1910. We may be sure he Polish pianist, conductor and politician). recognised a twin soul when he encountered the imaginative beauty of The work begins with a spiky rhythmic figure (bassoons and bass the orchestration. clarinet) which merges into a broad tune called the Warszawianka ‘Sea Slumber-Song’ gives the impression of a nocturnal seascape with (‘Bravely let us raise our flag’). Soon comes a characteristically Elgarian the tide lapping over pebbles poetically evoked by divided strings, harp 3 | ≥ ELGAR theme marked nobilmente. When this has run its course, we hear the POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE MARCHES 1-5, OP.39 Polish ‘Choral’ The Source of Fire first played by cellos, cor anglais and Elgar composed five of a projected six military marches between 1901 a harp and later by the full orchestra. The Warsaw theme is briefly and 1930. He took the title Pomp and Circumstance from Shakespeare’s developed and Elgar’s theme is repeated. It is followed by a quotation Othello: ‘The neighing steed and the shrill trump, the spirit-stirring from Paderewski’s Polish Fantasy for piano and orchestra and there is a drum, the ear-piercing fife, the royal banner, and all the quality, pride, reference to Chopin’s Nocturne in G minor, Op.37 No.1 played by a solo pomp and circumstance of glorious war’. Four of these marches were violin, during which the Paderewski theme can be heard. The earlier composed in the ten years from 1900 to 1910, his greatest creative Chopin quotation and the Paderewski are now run together until the period and the high noon of his fame in his lifetime. He intended that one return of the Warsaw theme. In the build up to the coda Elgar brings in of the set should be for a soldier’s funeral, but none is remotely funereal. the Polish National Anthem (‘Poland is not yet lost’). As this brilliantly He liked march rhythm and he first caught the national ear with the orchestrated score reaches its conclusion, the organ joins in. Imperial March of 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. This was followed by the Triumphal March in the cantata Caractacus of 1898 and there is the sombre and almost elegiac Coronation March written for King George V’s coronation in 1911. But Pomp and Circumstance was an unprecedented effort to give the ceremonial military march symphonic status. Elgar enjoyed colourful pageantry and was proud of his wife’s army connections (her father had been an Indian Army general). He told an interviewer in 1904: ‘I like to look on the composer’s vocation as the old troubadours or bards did. In those days it was no disgrace for a man to be turned on to step in front of an army and inspire them with song. For my part, I know that there are a lot of people who like to celebrate events with music To these people I have given tunes. Is that wrong?’ In regard to one tune in particular, the answer to that question can only be ‘No’. On 12 January 1901 Elgar wrote to A. J. Jaeger (‘Nimrod’ of the Enigma Variations): ‘Gosh, man, I’ve got a tune in my head’. Four months later he played this same tune to another of the ‘friends pictured within’ the Enigma Variations. She was Dora Penny (‘Dorabella’), to whom Elgar said: ‘I’ve got a tune that will knock ‘em – knock ‘em flat’. It was the melody of the trio section of Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 in D major, a tune now known to millions as ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. This march and No. 2 in A minor were first performed in Liverpool on 19 October 1901 by the Liverpool Orchestral Society, a semi-professional orchestra conducted by Alfred E. Rodewald, a cotton broker and 4 | ≥ ELGAR distinguished amateur musician and a friend of Elgar. They were September 1930, when Wood conducted. Elgar sketched the first theme repeated three days later at a London Promenade Concert conducted on an Ordnance Survey map when out driving in the Worcestershire by Henry J. Wood in a half-full Queen’s Hall (the Boer War was not countryside with his chauffeur Richard Mountford in June 1929. It was going well). After the D major March, which Wood with a showman’s a theme he had first invented fifty years earlier. flair placed second, the audience ‘simply rose and yelled’, as Sir Henry Each of the five marches is written on the same pattern of a vigorous, recorded years later in his autobiography, and it had to be played three rhythmical first section followed by a broad lyrical trio, but they are times.