After Dong-Suk Kang, eminently satisfying on Naxos, to say nothing of the classic, long-breathed Kennedy (EMI) or before him, Heifetz and Sammons, Accardo's Elgar sounds positively retiring, a world apart from the full-throated passions and aching nostalgia we have come to expect from this piece. For those of us weaned on the players listed above, his first entry is at once a surprise. Hickox has unfurled the opening tutti, richly, nobly, purposefully: enter now a withdrawn, chaste Accardo. The quiet, contemplative manner is at first quite affecting, the second subject eased in with modesty—poised and dignified. But isn't it all just too discreet: fastidious and small-gestured? Elgar was never any of these things. Beyond Accardo's customary suavity and elegance, it is some way to Elgarian breadth and amplitude. There is no lack of brilliance, the fireworks are dashingly, if somewhat tastefully, despatched: there are the sudden flashes of Paganinian dazzle, as in the virtuosic lead into the climax of the development (which Hickox duly gives its head), but in general the passagework carries too little dramatic fibre for my taste. I find Accardo short, often mean of phrase: he doesn't fill these notes, he doesn't play into the portamento where the music soars and swoops. Listen, for instance, to the apologetic way in which he negotiates the rich plunging seventh interval upon his re-entry after the climax. Or, in the slow movement (marked once more by a quiet detachment), the demonstrative flourish at 3'17'', again tossed off with scant awareness of its emotional charge. This brings me to another problem—something I hadn't previously associated with Accardo: intonation. The high B flat of this particular phrase is a little too flat for comfort—and that's a tendency throughout both these performances. Indeed, at times it is much more than a tendency.
There is a rapt high D in the closing pages of Walton's first movement which, for a split second or two (until Accardo makes the adjustment), is quite horribly flat. That shouldn't have found its way on to the finished master. Again, Accardo can shrug off the fleet-fingered difficulties with the best of them, just as he can spin the sweet soaring phrase above the stave. But the pyrotechnics are inclined to sound merely decorative in the Paganini manner (this is especially true of the Elgar finale) and what I don't get at all here is Walton's Mediterranean luxuriance: this playing is far too reserved, proper and unsexy for Walton. Hickox's butch, big-boned accompaniment again sounds to be from another world entirely. The recording balance doesn't exactly help—I'd say it serves only to diminish Accardo: he sounds slight, small in tone. It's the old question: how close the soloist? True, this is how we would hear him in the concert-hall; but this is not the concert-hall. Meanwhile I commend you to Kang or Kennedy's Elgar (the former an astonishing bargain, the latter touched with greatness) and indeed to Kennedy's Walton (the Violin and Viola Concertos with Previn—EMI).'