Edward Elgar Pomp

From Arturo Toscanini and Sir John Barbirolli to Riccardo Muti and Antonio Pappano in our own time, Italian-heritage performers have often brought special qualities of sympathy and understanding to Edward Elgar’s (1857-1934) music. Now comes a new recording made in the ‘boot’ of southern Italy, lending Mediterranean warmth and passion to a trio of Elgarian masterpieces.

Donald Runnicles leads the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in 'Britannia', a new Telarc recording of 20th-century British music. Recorded in Atlanta in April 2007, the album opens and closes with Edward Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March Nos. 1 and 4, among the most beloved and famous of all British compositions. The other four works on this disc are Mark-Anthony Turnage's Three Screaming Popes; Sir Peter Maxwell Davis's An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise featuring bagpiper Scott Long; James MacMillan's Britannia; and Benjamin Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, Op. 20.

Vasily Petrenko and the RLPO continue their critically acclaimed Elgar project with Sea Pictures and The Music Makers, with Kathryn Rudge as soloist. Sea Pictures is one of the composer’s most popular works and as an orchestral song cycle stands alongside those by Mahler and Strauss. The Music Makers however has had a more troubled history. Elgar had worked on it on and off from 1903 and it was premiered in 1912. Both words and music came in for criticism. Elgar quotes from his symphonies, and ‘Nimrod’ as well as other sources. It can be viewed in the same way as ‘Ein Heldenleben’’ though here the composer is not a hero, but a bard.

Great Britain’s famous Proms concerts usually end with a program that is British to the core, featuring many favorites that English audiences expect in the same way that Viennese audiences expect their Radetzky March on New Year’s. Let’s make this clear, then, from the start. This is not an actual Proms performance but a studio recording of music that is usually heard at that event. It is English to the core; about four tracks in, you’ll feel like you should be saluting as the Queen passes by.