BBC Proms interval Radio 3 Wednesday 29th July. I’ll be talking about Elgar’s relationship with his wife.
BBC Proms interval Radio 3 Sunday 23rd August. I’ll be talking about Mozart’s musical friendships.
BBC Radio 3 Record Review Building a Library: Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast. Saturday 10th October at 2pm.
NEW: Elgar/Owen Norris – Piano Concerto
Coming out soon on the Dutton label: David Owen Norris (solo piano) with the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Martin Yates
When Sir Edward Elgar died in February 1934, he left a handful of proposed works unrealized, including a Piano Concerto and a Third Symphony. Just as Anthony Payne, in the late 1990s, composed the Symphony from the sketches Elgar had left, David Owen Norris has now done the same for Elgar’s Piano Concerto.
This remarkable new realization has two sources. The first is the haphazard collection of manuscript sketches in the British Museum. The second is unique. On November 6th 1929, Elgar sat at the piano in the Recital Room at Queen’s Hall and improvised straight onto HMV’s hot wax. Sixty years later, David Owen Norris became the first to recreate those recorded improvisations, playing them by ear from a bootlegged cassette. The more he studied them, the clearer it became that they were audio-sketches, as it were, for the Piano Concerto. He has combined the manuscript sketches with the inspirations of the composer’s own fingers to write the Piano Concerto that was crowded out of Elgar’s mind by the Cello Concerto and the Third Symphony.
The result is one of the most exciting achievements in the world of music for several years. It demonstrates the truth of the contention that, just before his death, Elgar was on fire creatively. Elgar’s Third Symphony and this Piano Concerto, now both available for us all to hear, demonstrate that – far from being a relic of the Edwardian age – in the 1930s Elgar was still developing as a composer, creating arresting new sounds for a new age.
David Owen Norris’s new work is acclaimed by experts
Professor Andrew Kirkman: “The piece is entirely convincing, and that conviction is based on David’s deep and long-standing engagement with Elgar’s style and approach to form.”
Professor Jonathan Wainwright: “This wonderful project will be as critically acclaimed as Payne’s realisation of the sketches for the Third Symphony.”
Professor Julian Rushton: “David Owen Norris has done a remarkable job. The task was in some ways more difficult even than Anthony Payne’s ‘realisation’ of sketches and drafts for the Third Symphony. The Elgar/Owen Norris concerto will enrich our understanding of the composer’s thinking at a late stage in his life.”
And the actor and Elgar enthusiast, Simon Callow: “I can scarcely find the words to describe the excitement of hearing the concerto last week …. the extraordinary and even breathtaking sense, as in the 3rd Symphony, of Elgar reaching out towards something quite new, his remarkable musical mind extending, as in Whitman’s phrase, toward the unknown region.”
The first public performance of the Elgar/Owen Norris Piano Concerto will be in the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester – Elgar’s own city – on July 25th 2027.
