With a performance of Elgar's Second Symphony lasting 62½ minutes, we are into Sinopoli territory. The difference is that whereas while I was listening to Sinopoli's DG recording I was acutely aware that it was very slow, it surprised me to discover how long Jeffrey Tate had taken. It does not sound a slow interpretation, because it has such rhythmic vitality. The opening of the first movement, for example, is marked allegro vivace e nobilmente and Tate's stress is on vivace: it fairly blazes.
It is an interpretation at the opposite extreme from Menuhin's (Virgin Classics), which comes closer to Elgar's than almost anyone's. Slatkin (RCA) steers a course between the tight-lipped and the expansive, but comes nearer to Tate in treatment of the mysterious, half-lit passage at the centre of the first movement where Elgar spoke of ''a malign influence''. The malignancy is not to be doubted in Tate's performance. Strangely, although Handley's is to my ears a rather sobersides performance, he too draws out the espressivo as far as he dare.
Tate receives a clearer, richer recording than RCA gave Slatkin, and the LSO plays for him with real exuberance, the cello section being superb. Some may find the brass too prominent, but obviously Tate wanted a raw, passionate sound. The drums in the Larghetto, for example, are the drums of doom, violent and eruptive, and here at long last is a conductor who makes the percussive outburst at the end of the Rondo the terrifying blotting-out hammering that Elgar intended.
Response to this symphony depends on one's mood at the time. On some days one welcomes Tate's romantic anguish or Barbirolli's end-of-Empire elegy, on others one needs the strict control of Boult or Menuhin. I suspect the same applies to individual conductors, too, some of whose public performances may vary by as much as five minutes between one occasion and another. This, I am told, was true of Elgar, which is why I am wary of regarding his 1927 recording as definitive. Tate provides yet another compelling view of this endlessly fascinating work.'