“Never has so great an orchestra made so lamentable a public exhibition of itself” wrote The Observer’s critic on 2nd November 1919. “…the orchestra was often virtually inaudible, and when just audible was merely a muddle. No one seemed to have any idea of what it was the composer wanted.”
Considering the conductor of the music was the composer this was a pretty scathing judgement. A judgement made more surprising by the knowledge that the critic was reviewing the first performance of one of British music’s most loved compositions-Elgar’s Cello Concerto.
By all accounts the premiere of Elgar’s masterpiece was a fiasco. The London Symphony Orchestra had appointed a new conductor-Albert Coates-who was determined to show what he could do on such an important occasion. Coates was conducting everything but the mew concerto and used up most of the rehearsal time. “That brute Coates went on rehearsing Wagner’s Siegfried” wrote Elgar’s wife, Alice, in her diary.
Chief victim of the fall out from the debacle was the cello soloist, Felix Salmond. Salmond was a finest rate player with a robust tone and sensitive phrasing. It would have been fascinating to have the interpretation of the concerto’s first performer preserved on disc but, even in1919, the vagaries of the record business came into play.
Elgar was under contract to the Gramophone Company (now know as EMI), Salmond wasn’t. At first the record company sniffed around the Portuguese cellist, Madame Guilhermina Suggia, but she asked for too much money, (same misjudgement!)
Then-rather than staying with Salmond-they turned to a young, attractive British cellist, Beatrice Harrison. (Some things never change.) Less than two months after its premiere, Beatrice was in Elgar’s drawing room preparing the new concerto for it’s first recording a few days later.
Devastated Salmond left for America where he became Professor of cello at Curtis Institute, Philadelphia. Despite embarking on busy solo career, Salmond never played the Elgar again and refused to teach the concerto to his pupils.
Eleven years after Elgar wrote his Cello Concerto another British composer produced cello masterpiece which remains barely know today. Over the last few weeks I have spent and enjoyable time ‘dusting down’ save wonderful English Compositions in preparation for this month’s inaugural English Music Festival.
Amongst there is Frank Bridge’s incredible ‘Oration’ for cello and orchestra, composed as in 1930 as “and outcry against the futility of war”. Even allowing for that English tendency (unknown to the Scottish and the Welsh) to apologize for breathing, the lack of support for this celebration of our cultural heritage has been extraordinary. The Arts Council of England has failed to support it at all and response to request for help made by the EMF’s unpaid director, Em Marshall, to more than 4000 businesses has been deafening by its silence.
Perhaps its best summed up by the treatment meted out to another of the composer’s whose music I will play at the festival, John Ireland. A lifelong inhabitant of Kensington & Chelsea (where for many years he was professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music & organist at St Luke’s, Chelsea. Ireland died in 1964 but-forty years later-it wasn’t his statue that was erected, amidst great pomp & ceremony, outside South Kensington tube station but the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok’s-who may(or may not) have walked down Fulham Road a couple of times in the ‘20’s.
I wonder when, in these days of European union, we may look forward to the reciprocal appearance of a statue of John Ireland in Budapest?
