About Elgar’s Violin Concerto, Diana McVeagh once commented: ‘To listen to the Violin Concerto is at times like eavesdropping on a private conversation – or even a confessional – so inward is its quality.’ How true this is in terms of the music’s deeply personal connotations. The violin was, after all, Elgar’s instrument, and his understanding of its tessitura, tone and technical capabilities was consummate. Yet, like the First Symphony before it, the Concerto is an immense outpouring of material; the weight of the thematic ideas in the work is, dare one say it, almost overwhelming, and this is borne out by its enormous length of around 50 minutes or more. The combined durations of the first and slow movement more than exceed the entire expanse of the later Cello Concerto, which seems like a diminutive suite of movements by contrast. It has been occasionally suggested that the stamina required for the Violin Concerto has been a deterrent to its more regular performance, though this recording, Nicola Benedetti’s recent one (Decca, 6/20) and Ning Feng’s (Channel Classics, 1/19) suggest to the contrary.

A shade more generous in its time span than the Decca recording, this highly engaging performance by Rattle, the LSO and Renaud Capuçon has all the athleticism Elgar’s score demands (and that goes for the orchestra as well as the soloist), but it is also thoroughly imbued with the composer’s intimate yearning poetry, an attribute borne out especially by the elegiac interpretation of the slow movement (the melancholy with which Capuçon admits a special affinity in his short introduction to the disc). Perhaps more than anywhere else in Elgar’s orchestral output, this score is festooned with tempo and dynamic changes, a feature Parry once referred to as Elgar’s characteristic ‘spasms’. Rattle handles this constant flux masterfully, and the splendid sense of ensemble from the LSO supports the constant ebb and flow of the soloist’s elastic role with impressive felicity. It is also nice to hear some appropriate use of portamento, which was very much part of the Elgar ‘style’ in his Edwardian heyday. Capuçon is particularly imposing in the finale (arguably the most original part of Elgar’s vast structure), where his technical brilliance and lyrical intensity shine in the extended cyclic statement of Elgar’s accompanied cadenza – a supreme test for any virtuoso violinist, not least after the two previous movements.

There are many great recordings of this work. Among the firmament of archive recordings are Sammons (1929), Menuhin with Elgar (1932) and Heifetz (1949), while the one made by Campoli with Boult in the 1950s is, to me, especially fine. Of more recent vintage, Nigel Kennedy (EMI/Warner, 1/98) is expansive, James Ehnes (Onyx, 1/08) vivacious and wistful, and Tasmin Little (Chandos, 12/10) brings her characteristic care to phrasing and nuance. Capuçon’s interpretation is undoubtedly an exceptional one in its affection and sympathy for the long, plangent lines of Elgar’s score; it is also a reading intensified by the empathetic support and élan of Rattle and the LSO.

Emanating from the end of the war, the Violin Sonata might seem to embody a different Elgar, shaped by the sadness of war, the illness of his wife and fear of a changing world. Yet as a piece it shares many similar aspects with the Concerto (if not the latter’s sheer size) in its super-abundance of thematic ideas and its quasi-orchestral identity. Indeed, the piano part, which Stephen Hough negotiates with insight and a menagerie of different touches and tone qualities, has the ambience of an orchestra manqué. Capuçon’s melancholic sympathies with this music never seem far away in the first movement (above all in the reverie of Elgar’s wonderful second subject played across the strings) and the mysterious ‘Romance’, but the elation of the last movement shows that he is equally capable of that bracing optimism that is so much a part of the last pages of the Concerto.