Nothing in recent years has given the true Elgarian more pleasure than the revival of interest in his music among international musicians. The idea that, somehow, only British musicians can interpret Elgar's music satisfactorily is abhorrent to those who love it. It was, after all, German, Austrian and Russian conductors and instrumentalists who appreciated his stature before his fellow countrymen did. Of course, British conductors find a special quality in the music, but a really great work of art invites and can sustain many different approaches. Now Giuseppe Sinopoli has decided to explore Elgar with the Philharmonia Orchestra and he has started, where the recording studio is concerned, by jumping in at the deep end with the Second Symphony, a work notoriously difficult to interpret and one that, because of its kaleidoscopic changes of mood, means something different to a listener at almost every re-hearing.
The first thing to say about this recording, apart from its technical excellence, is that the performance lasts 65 minutes, which is ten minutes longer than the average and even longer than certain other individual performances. It is devastatingly slow, much too slow, and for many listeners that will be enough to damn it out of hand. I confess that my reaction after first hearing it was a mixture of bewilderment and rage, but that did not seem a good frame of mind in which to write a review, so I listened again, and again.
I cannot pretend that I like it much more now, but I do not believe, as some of my colleagues evidently do, that one can dismiss Sinopoli as a musician of no account. Plainly, he is a highly intelligent conductor who looks at a score and gives us what he finds there, with no pre-conceptions. But he has mistaken Elgar's nobilmente for Bruckner's maestoso. The slow tempos occur mainly in the first two movements. He turns the Larghetto into a dirge, draining it of its noble anguish, and in the first movement all Elgar's indications of vivace, animato, impetuoso are ignored because the basic pulse is too languid. Sinopoli has no conception, it would seem, of the energy in Elgar's music. He sees only the tragedy and brings it into the foreground. Yet its effect is greater when understated.
While I cannot pretend that this recording will often be taken down from my shelf, it is of interest to hear Sinopoli's remarkable exposure of the work's textures, particularly the sinister quality of the scoring for the deep brass, the rhythmical lightness of his start to the third movement and the beauty of the cellos, especially in the first movement. But the art of interpreting an Elgar symphony is to cohere all those short melodic repetitions and sequences into a spontaneous whole which then sounds like a broadly conceived panoramic canvas. This is what has eluded Sinopoli. From him we get the trees, but not (as yet) the wood. The orchestral playing, by the way, is superb.'