How many symphonies did the composer Sir Edward Elgar complete?
"Elgar Symphony No. 2 discography Edward Elgar's Symphony No 2 was first recorded complete in 1927 by His Master's Voice (later part of the EMI group) conducted by the composer. (Elgar had conducted a truncated version by the old acoustic process in 1924.) This recording was reissued on LP record and later on compact disc. There was no further recording for eighteen years, until Sir Adrian Boult made the first of his five recordings of the symphony in 1945. Since then there have been more than twenty-four new recordings. BBC Radio 3's ""Building a Library"" feature has broadcast comparative reviews"
"to revitalise our musical culture"". The Symphony, in four movements, takes about 55 minutes in performance. The first recording was made for the NMC label by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Davis, in October 1997, four months before the first public performance. Subsequent recordings have been made by: Symphony No. 3 (Elgar/Payne) Edward Elgar's Third Symphony Op. 88 (posth.) was incomplete at the time of his death in 1934. Elgar left 130 pages of sketches which the British composer Anthony Payne worked on for many years, producing a complete symphony in 1997, officially known as ""Edward Elgar: the"
"Elgar is widely acknowledged as one of England's leading composers, his orchestral music, with the exception of the ""Enigma Variations"", the Cello Concerto, and his ""Pomp and Circumstance"" Marches, is only sporadically programmed outside Britain. The symphony was first recorded complete in 1927 by His Master's Voice, part of the EMI group, conducted by the composer. This recording was later reissued on LP and later on CD. There was no further recording for eighteen years, until Sir Adrian Boult and the BBC Symphony Orchestra made a recordings of the symphony in 1944. Since then there have been more than twenty-four"
"Symphony No. 3 (Elgar/Payne) Edward Elgar's Third Symphony Op. 88 (posth.) was incomplete at the time of his death in 1934. Elgar left 130 pages of sketches which the British composer Anthony Payne worked on for many years, producing a complete symphony in 1997, officially known as ""Edward Elgar: the sketches for Symphony No 3 elaborated by Anthony Payne"" or in brief ""Elgar/Payne Symphony No 3"". The first public performance was at the Royal Festival Hall on 15 February 1998, by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davis. After the death of his wife in 1920, Elgar retreated into"
"composition. Gustav Mahler's Seventh Symphony, composed at the same time, runs for well over an hour. During the next four years, however, Elgar composed three major concert pieces, which, though shorter than comparable works by some of his European contemporaries, are among the most substantial such works by an English composer. These were his First Symphony, Violin Concerto, and Second Symphony, which all play for between forty-five minutes and an hour. McVeagh says of the symphonies that they ""rank high not only in Elgar's output but in English musical history. Both are long and powerful, without published programmes, only hints"
"String Quartet (Elgar) The String Quartet in E minor, Op. 83, was one of three major chamber music works composed by Sir Edward Elgar in 1918. The others were the Violin Sonata in E minor, Op. 82, and the Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 84. Along with the Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85 of 1919, these were to be his last major works prior to his death in 1934. The String Quartet lasts for around 25 minutes and is in three movements: The slow middle movement was a favourite of Elgar's wife Lady Elgar, who described it"
"only member common to both groups.) String Quartet (Elgar) The String Quartet in E minor, Op. 83, was one of three major chamber music works composed by Sir Edward Elgar in 1918. The others were the Violin Sonata in E minor, Op. 82, and the Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 84. Along with the Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85 of 1919, these were to be his last major works prior to his death in 1934. The String Quartet lasts for around 25 minutes and is in three movements: The slow middle movement was a favourite of Elgar's"
"a strong argument as to the structure of the Fugue to come. (See external links.) Sir Edward Elgar was composing a Symphony No. 3 at the time of his death and left 130 pages of sketches. These sketches were put into a reasonable order, orchestrated in the style of Elgar, and elaborated by Anthony Payne. Payne's reconstruction has been played numerous times to great acclaim. Some works, deemed complete by the composer, are nonetheless augmented for non-musical reasons. In May 2000 composer Colin Matthews premiered his ""completion"" of Gustav Holst's ""The Planets"", whereby he composed a piece for the ninth"
"two of the ""Enigma Variations"", one of ""Falstaff"", and none of ""The Dream of Gerontius"". Since then there have been multiple recordings of all the major works. More than thirty recordings have been made of the First Symphony since 1955, for example, and more than a dozen of ""The Dream of Gerontius"". Similarly, in the concert hall, Elgar's works, after a period of neglect, are once again frequently programmed. The Elgar Society's website, in its diary of forthcoming performances, lists performances of Elgar's works by orchestras, soloists and conductors across Europe, North America and Australia. Elgar was knighted in 1904,"
"two concerts a day, and extending both his orchestral and chamber music repertoire. Sammons was particularly associated with Edward Elgar's Violin Concerto in B minor, which he first played on 23 November 1914. He made the first complete recording of the concerto on 18 March and 10 April 1929 with the New Queen's Hall Orchestra conducted by Sir Henry Wood, which displays ""wonderfully assured portamenti carried as if on the breath of a great singer"" and ""immense structural strength"". He estimated that he played the concerto over a hundred times, including at The Proms. He gave his last performance of"
"Violin Sonata (Elgar) Sir Edward Elgar wrote his Violin Sonata in E minor, Op. 82, in 1918, at the same time as he wrote his String Quartet in E minor and his Piano Quintet in A minor. These three chamber music works were all written at ""Brinkwells"", the country house near Fittleworth in West Sussex that Lady Elgar had acquired for her husband to recuperate and compose in, and they mark his major contribution to the chamber music genre. His Cello Concerto in E minor of 1919 completed the quartet of introspective and melancholy works that comprised Elgar's last major"
"compose a symphony. The work reveals his continuing progress in writing sustained themes and orchestral lines, although some critics, including Kennedy, find that in the middle part ""Elgar's inspiration burns at less than its brightest."" In 1905 Elgar completed the ""Introduction and Allegro for Strings"". This work is based, unlike much of Elgar's earlier writing, not on a profusion of themes but on only three. Kennedy called it a ""masterly composition, equalled among English works for strings only by Vaughan Williams's ""Tallis Fantasia""."" Nevertheless, at less than a quarter of an hour, it was not by contemporary standards a lengthy"
"a further two weeks. Elgar later extracted five of the pieces – 1(a), 2, 5, 8 and 4 – and added an intermezzo for solo violin to create The Crown of India Suite. The first performance was at the Hereford Festival on 11 September 1912, by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer. The Suite gained immediate popularity: during Elgar's lifetime, there were 102 live performances of it on the BBC. The Crown of India March from the incidental music for the masque is also performed separately. The complete score for the ""Crown of India"" incidental music was only"
"the composer Sir Edward Elgar along the River Amazon in 1923. Regarded by admirers as being among the best British novels of the 1980s, its poetic language, dreamlike landscapes and lush imaginings won him the Whitbread Award for first novel. In 1992, he published ""Seven-Tenths"", a far-ranging meditation upon the sea and its meanings. A mixture of art, science, history and philosophy, this book is a deep, abstract lament on loss and the loss of meaning. In 2000, he returned to the magazine industry as a science columnist for ""Das Magazin"" (Zurich) for two years before becoming a science columnist"
"William Henry Reed William Henry ""Billy"" Reed (29 July 18752 July 1942) was an English violinist, teacher, minor composer, conductor and biographer of Sir Edward Elgar. He was leader of the London Symphony Orchestra for 23 years (1912–1935), but is best known for his long personal friendship with Elgar (1910–1934) and his book ""Elgar As I Knew Him"" (1936), in which he goes into great detail about the genesis of the Violin Concerto in B minor. The book also provides a large number of Elgar's sketches for his unfinished Third Symphony, which proved invaluable sixty years later when Anthony Payne"
"as the pre-eminent British composer of his generation. The work is formally titled ""Variations on an Original Theme""; the word ""Enigma"" appears over the first six bars of music, which led to the familiar version of the title. The enigma is that, although there are fourteen variations on the ""original theme"", there is another overarching theme, never identified by Elgar, which he said ""runs through and over the whole set"" but is never heard. Later commentators have observed that although Elgar is today regarded as a characteristically English composer, his orchestral music and this work in particular share much with"
"two of Elgar's most large-scale works, the Violin Concerto and the Second Symphony, and is a contrastingly short and gentle piece, lasting under eight minutes in performance. The Elgar expert Michael Kennedy remarks of it that it portrays the bassoon as poet and singer rather than comedian. The work is scored for an orchestra consisting of, besides the solo bassoon, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets in B♭, 2 bassoons (2nd ad lib) 3 horns in F, 3 trombones ad lib, timpani, and strings. Both versions have been recorded. Liner notes to EMI recordings mentioned above, by Michael Kennedy and"
"of all available recordings of the symphony on three occasions since the 1980s. The recommendations were as follows: ""The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music"", 2008, gave its maximum four star rating to the Decca recording by Solti and the London Philharmonic, coupled with the First Symphony, and the EMI recording by Handley with the same orchestra. In September 2011, ""Gramophone"" in a comparative review of all recordings of the work recommended those by the composer, Thomson, Elder, and, as first choice, Boult (1968). Elgar Symphony No. 2 discography Edward Elgar's Symphony No 2 was first recorded complete in 1927"
"conductors Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim, Bernard Haitink, Tadaaki Otaka, André Previn, Constantin Silvestri, Giuseppe Sinopoli, and Leonard Slatkin. BBC Radio 3's ""Building a Library"" feature, a comparative review of all available recordings, has considered the symphony three times since 1982. ""The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music"", 2008 edition, contains two pages of reviews of the work. The two recordings recommended by both the BBC and ""The Penguin Guide"" are by Boult and the London Philharmonic Orchestra (1977) and Vernon Handley with the same orchestra (1979). Symphony No. 1 (Elgar) Sir Edward Elgar's Symphony No. 1 in A major, Op."
"Elgar Violin Concerto discography Edward Elgar's Violin Concerto was first recorded complete in 1929. Truncated versions had been recorded in 1916 using the acoustic recording process, the technical limitations of which necessitated drastic rearrangement of the score. Electrical recording, introduced in the 1920s, gave a greatly improved dynamic range and realism, and the two leading English record companies, Columbia and His Master's Voice (HMV) both made recordings of the concerto that remain in the catalogue. The first was made for Columbia by Albert Sammons with the New Queen's Hall Orchestra conducted by Sir Henry Wood. Elgar's own recording with the"
"Lady"", which was issued on CD. The Third Symphony sketches were elaborated by the composer Anthony Payne into a complete score in 1998. Inoperable colorectal cancer was discovered during an operation on 8 October 1933. He told his consulting doctor, Arthur Thomson, that he had no faith in an afterlife: ""I believe there is nothing but complete oblivion."" Elgar died on 23 February 1934 at the age of seventy-six and was buried next to his wife at St. Wulstan's Roman Catholic Church in Little Malvern. Elgar was contemptuous of folk music and had little interest in or respect for the"
"they would come into the public domain and the Elgar family would be powerless to prevent anyone ""tinkering"" with them. In 1974, a BBC Radio 3 producer, Dr Roger Fiske, devised a programme about the Symphony, and orchestrated some of the sketches, completed Elgar's unfinished scoring and composed some other passages. Elgar's daughter gave her approval and Sir Adrian Boult agreed to conduct the music. The score was sent for copying to Maurice Johnstone, a former BBC head of music. Johnstone felt strongly that the broadcast would amount to ""tinkering"" with the score and he successfully persuaded Boult to withdraw"
"in 1991, was based on a handwritten publisher’s fair copy. This publication was subsequently revised following the reappearance of the composer”s original orchestral MS in 2010. In addition to the composer's orchestral and brass versions The Severn Suite The Severn Suite, Opus 87, is a musical work written by Sir Edward Elgar. It is a late composition, written in 1930, the result of an invitation to write a test piece for the National Brass Band Championship. It was dedicated to his friend, the author and critic George Bernard Shaw. There are five movements, which follow each other without breaks: The"
"Daniel Barenboim, Sir Georg Solti, Leonard Bernstein, Giuseppe Sinopoli, Leopold Stokowski, Eugene Ormandy, Pierre Monteux, William Steinberg and André Previn, as well as leading English conductors from Sir Henry Wood and Sir Adrian Boult to Sir Simon Rattle. Enigma Variations Edward Elgar composed his Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36, popularly known as the Enigma Variations, between October 1898 and February 1899. It is an orchestral work comprising fourteen variations on an original theme. Elgar dedicated the work ""to my friends pictured within"", each variation being a musical sketch of one of his circle of close acquaintances (see musical"
"In ten seasons Halford's orchestra gave over 80 works their Birmingham premieres, including pieces by the Russian composers Alexander Borodin, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Modest Mussorgsky and Alexander Glazunov; the Austrian Anton Bruckner and British composers Edward Elgar, Rutland Boughton, Granville Bantock and Charles Villiers Stanford, as well as neglected works by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. Halford's orchestra was taken seriously by many outstanding musicians from outside the city and composers were often invited to conduct performances of their own music. On 21 January 1902 Edward Elgar conducted the orchestra in his own ""Cockaigne"" and his first two ""Pomp and Circumstance Marches"";"
"elaborated and essentially completed the work, although Reed wrote that in his view the symphony could not be completed. He was best known for his soft and humble music. His name appears in various forms: William Henry Reed, W. H. Reed, W. H. ""Billy"" Reed, Billy Reed and Willie Reed. He was known to his friends as Billy. William Henry Reed was born in Frome, Somerset. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London under Émile Sauret, Frederick Corder and others, graduating with honours. He first met Edward Elgar in 1902, as a violinist in the Queen's Hall"
"to assert his independence as an artist. The symphony is scored for 3 flutes (1 doubling on piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 B clarinets, E clarinet, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, bass drum, tambourine, cymbals, 2 harps, and strings. The first movement is the longest of the four, running at approximately 17 minutes. The opening contains wide intervals in the strings and upper winds with upward leaps, thus allowing Elgar to create much expression and passion. Elgar himself described this movement as ""tremendous in energy"". It opens with what"
"Introduction and Allegro (Elgar) Sir Edward Elgar's Introduction and Allegro for Strings, Op. 47, was composed in 1905 for performance in an all-Elgar concert by the newly formed London Symphony Orchestra. Scored for string quartet and string orchestra, Elgar composed it to show off the players' virtuosity. Though initial critical reception was lukewarm at best, the score soon came to be recognized as a masterpiece. The work, which is roughly twelve to fourteen minutes in length, is like a multi-layered symphonic poem for string orchestra, with several prominent themes. The work is dedicated to Samuel Sanford, who had been instrumental"
"Edward Elgar, Gustav Mahler, Jean Sibelius, Carl Nielsen, Igor Stravinsky, Bohuslav Martinů, Roger Sessions, and Dmitri Shostakovich composed symphonies ""extraordinary in scope, richness, originality, and urgency of expression"" (Steinberg 1995, 404). One measure of the significance of a symphony is the degree to which it reflects conceptions of temporal form particular to the age in which it was created. Five composers from across the span of the 20th century who fulfil this measure are Sibelius, Stravinsky, Luciano Berio (in his Sinfonia, 1968–69), Elliott Carter (in his ""Symphony of Three Orchestras"", 1976), and Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen (in ""Symphony/Antiphony"", 1980). Beginning in the"
"three were involved in the BBC broadcast of the midnight and Christmas morning services in 2007, with the boys and the girls of the Cathedral Choir, respectively, taking the lead in the two services. Since the 18th century, Worcester Cathedral Choir has taken part in the Three Choirs Festival, the oldest music festival in the world. The composer Edward Elgar spent most of his life in Worcestershire. The first performance of the revised version of his Enigma Variations – the version usually performed – took place at the cathedral during the 1899 Three Choirs Festival. He is commemorated in a"
"creating Electric and Musical Industries (EMI). The recordings made under his supervision include Sir Edward Elgar's series of records of his symphonies, concertos and other major works. With Bernard Shaw, the BBC and others, Gaisberg was partly responsible for persuading Elgar to write a third symphony, although he died before he could complete any more than initial sketches. (They were eventually ""elaborated"" into a symphonic shape by the composer Anthony Payne four decades later.) Gaisberg refused offers of a directorship at HMV, preferring to remain a link between the artists and the company. At age 66, in 1939, he retired"
"some of the composer's musical confidantes – Reed worked with him on the Violin Concerto and the Third Symphony, and Salmond worked on the Cello Concerto with him. Albert Sammons later made the first complete recording of the Violin Concerto. The work is dedicated to Ernest Newman, music critic of ""The Manchester Guardian"". There are three movements: In performance, the first movement takes about 14 minutes, the adagio a little under 12, and the last movement a little over 10, making this the longest of Elgar’s chamber works. His wife's first reaction on hearing the three chamber works was 'E."
"Variations"" (1899) became immediately popular in Britain and overseas. He followed the Variations with a choral work, ""The Dream of Gerontius"" (1900), based on a Roman Catholic text that caused some disquiet in the Anglican establishment in Britain, but it became, and has remained, a core repertory work in Britain and elsewhere. His later full-length religious choral works were well received but have not entered the regular repertory. In his fifties, Elgar composed a symphony and a violin concerto that were immensely successful. His second symphony and his cello concerto did not gain immediate public popularity and took many years"