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Description: Gennadi Rozhdestvensky conducts Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No 2, featuring Viktoria Postnikova, and Suite No 3 In G.
Phone: 0871663 2500
Website: www.southbankcentre.co.uk
Extra info: Food, Air Conditioning, Pub, Telephones
Loving advocate of Elgar: conductor Mark Elder
Elgar's head, with stiff profile and Edwardian handlebar moustache, still graces our £20 notes, with Worcester Cathedral - his local, though he was Roman Catholic - in the background. Even if you get beyond the Elgar of nobilmente Pomp and Circumstance, he still occupies an unassailable place in the national, specifically English, psyche.
This year's 150th birthday celebrations have not entirely banished that prejudice. Yet Elgar is far more interesting, his music more richly imaginative than this narrow focus allows. Artistically, he was a European. He travelled to Germany, admired Brahms and Schumann, and was championed by Richard Strauss. He also thought most English music dire.
The London Philharmonic Orchestra's Elgar Tribute, on the face of it heavily patriotic, turned out to be a clever decoy. Despite opening with a Civic Fanfare and an over-egged version of the National Anthem, it deftly exposed the invention and variety in Elgar's music, helped by conductor Mark Elder's loving advocacy.
Even the little known memorial cantata, The Spirit of England, came into its own in the lead up to Remembrance Day - having felt mawkish in the context of this year's Last Night of the Proms. This setting of poems by Laurence Binyon includes "For the Fallen", which contains the line "At the going down of the sun".
While the American soprano Emily Magee sounded inappropriately operatic, a blazing LPO chorus compensated with well-drilled magnificence.
The Nursery Suite (1931), inspired by the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, appears wistful and effortless. Its title misleads. This is an adult memory of childhood conjured with painful nostalgia, beautifully caught by the LPO, with silken strings and eloquent solo flute. Bar a couple of fiendish staccato passages, the strings were again adroit in the Introduction and Allegro, an idea suggested to Elgar by his friend Jaeger, "Nimrod" in the Enigma Variations.
Played well, the Variations, bursting with contrast and freshness, deserve their place in the pantheon. Here, the LPO shone, spaciously but energetically steered by Elder. Variation XII, with its heartfelt cello melody dedicated to Basil G Nevinson, touches us most: "simply a tribute to a very dear old friend", as the composer put it.
Elgar was unembarrassed to wear his heart on his sleeve. In that respect, this most English of Englishmen was decidedly continental. It's time we learnt.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
