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Elgar's Piano Quintet The Quintet in A minor for Piano and String Quartet, Op 84 is a chamber work by Edward Elgar. He worked on the Quintet and two other major chamber pieces in the summer of 1918 while staying at Brinkwells in Sussex. W H Reed considered that all three were ‘influenced by the quiet and peaceful surroundings during that wonderful summer’. The Quintet was first performed on 21 May 1919, by the pianist William Murdoch, the violinists Albert Sammons and W H Reed, the violist Raymond Jeremy and the cellist Felix Salmond. These players included some of the composer’s musical confidantes – Reed worked with him on several pieces and Salmond worked on the Cello Concerto with him. Albert Sammons later made the first complete recording of the Violin Concerto. The work is dedicated to Ernest Newman, music critic of The Manchester Guardian. There are three movements:
In performance, the first movement takes about 14 minutes, the adagio a little under 12, and the last movement a little over 10, making this the longest of Elgar’s chamber works. His wife's first reaction on hearing the three chamber works was 'E. writing wonderful new music', and more than fifty years later The Gramophone agreed: 'Alice Elgar was quite right: it is a new urgency, pointed and refined by the discipline of writing chamber music, a discipline that clearly rejuvenated Elgar's imagination. It is big chamber music, with at times an almost orchestral sonority to it...' The Quintet was first recorded by Harriet Cohen and the Stratton Quartet at the beginning of October 1933, immediately before the composer became seriously ill. Test pressings were rushed to Elgar's bedside; the pleasure he gained from them inspiring Fred Gaisberg to record the Quartet as a Christmas present to the ailing composer. The work took some years to establish itself in the repertoire, but in recent years it has been performed and recorded many times.
Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Quintet_in_A_minor_(Elgar)
This Recording - Technical Assessment Original surface quality: There's one word which precisely describes the surface quality of much of this recording: dismal. Unfortunately those were the good bits!. Other notes: It took the development of a new restoration technique, whilst working on the very first recordings being made at the same time as this by Louis Armstrong, to finally allow me to produce a listenable result for this recording. All previous attempts suffered either from excessive noise problems or excessive digital artefacts through over-processing. In addition there were unsteady tones running through nine of the ten sides, varying between about 220Hz and 240Hz, the source of which remains a complete mystery. Thus what had been intended as a centre-piece of our original NGS launch has had to await a further six weeks of work in the studio before being ready for release. After so many weeks of listening to what were ultimately discarded efforts, I'm particularly pleased with the end result, which for so long appeared beyond the bounds of possibility. A note on the dating - it has proved very difficult indeed to date the NGS releases prepared by Vocalion. Another discography dates this to December 1925 but this now seems unlikely, with records indicating that it was neither agreed upon by the NGS committe nor announced until January 1926, with the discs made and ready for distribution to NGS members in May 1926.
National Gramophonic Society recordings - a technical perspective
The vast majority of the original discs came from Gramophone magazine's own near-mint collection, carefully preserved in the EMI vaults at Hayes and largely unplayed for many decades. Where a choice of discs was present, naturally the very best sides were chosen for transfer, which took place at Pristine Audio over the spring, summer and autumn of 2006. Discs were carefully cleaned and a choice of custom-made stylii were available to achieve the optimum replay possible. Transfers were made at 24-bit resolution and then archived in 32-bit sound. Some initial restorations were carried out at the time of transfer, but all of the recordings presented here have been newly XR-remastered, starting in February 2008, directly from those high-quality transfers. Without the benefits of modern audio restoration technologies, it is safe to say that a good number of the Society's output would be beyond the listening tolerance of all but the most devoted and dedicated music-lover. Of the 165 numbered discs it is not until we reach discs 103-4 (the Malipiero String Quartet No. 2) that something truly remarkable happens sonically, a result of switching allegiances to the Columbia Record Company for recording and pressing duties. Prior to this the results are variable in the extreme - and the problems don't really stop after disc 104 either - we are still talking about the early days of electrical recording, and it seems clear from this history of the Society that money was tight. But for the 1920's listener, these matters would surely have been secondary to being able to hear any of these works at all, as the National Gramophonic Society's remit was to record music that had been ignored by the other record companies. The challenge for the 21st Century therefore is to render these recordings in such a way as to be faithful to the musicians as well as sparing the listener too much pain. I've tried to strike a careful balance between noise reduction and the dangers of over-processing and deadening the sound which, in some cases, may leave some of the blemishes more obvious than you might be used to hearing - if this is the case in any particular recording, I can only respond with "well you should have heard it before I started work on it!" There are many fine recording here, and I hope you will enjoy them as much as I have. Andrew Rose, March 2008
The National Gramophonic Society The National Gramophonic Society (NGS) was founded in 1923 by the novelist Compton Mackenzie to promote music which was ignored by major music companies. The Society was established for the recording and publication by subscription of classical music, principally chamber music, which was of limited circulation. Prominent on the committee for the selection of material was Walter Willson Cobbett, who was joined by Spencer Dyke (leader of a string quartet), W. R. Anderson, Alec Robinson, Peter Latham and Compton MacKenzie. Cobbett (b 1847), a chamber-music specialist, had founded the Cobbett Competition in 1905 for a short form of String Quartet composition or 'Phantasy', and for other short chamber works, prizes won variously by William Yeates Hurlestone (1876-1906, pianist) (1905), Frank Bridge (1908), John Ireland (1909), J. Cliffe Forrester (1916), H. Waldo Warner (viola of the London Quartet) (1916), York Bowen (1918) and Cecil Armstrong Gibbs (1919). In 1921 he was offering further awards to Royal Academy and Royal College of Music graduates, and commissioned many new chamber works from English composers. The National Gramophonic Society was therefore an expression of this impetus to the development of the taste for modern chamber music. The records, issued on 12-inch 78rpm (or in some cases 80rpm) discs with distinctive yellow labels, included the first-ever recordings of familiar works such as the C major quintet of Schubert and Brahms's clarinet quintet, along with pieces (then relatively little known) by Henry Purcell, Vivaldi and Mozart. The organization also helped several living composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, Peter Warlock (first recording of The Curlew), Eugene Goossens, Arnold Schönberg (original chamber version of Verklärte Nacht) and Sir Edward Elgar to gain greater recognition for their works. The repertoire consisted largely of chamber music, featuring the Spencer Dyke Quartet and the International String Quartet, but included some works for small orchestra and a few vocal items. Musicians who took part included John Barbirolli (as both cellist and conductor), the clarinettists Charles Draper and Frederick Thurston, the oboeist Leon Goossens, the violinist Adila Fachiri, and the pianists Donald Francis Tovey, Harold Craxton, Kathleen Long and Ethel Bartlett. The NGS ceased operations in 1931. Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gramophonic_Society
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