Another orchestra, another concert hall, another series. With his Richard Strauss tribute at the Barbican safely dispatched, the indefatigable Richard Hickox has now turned his attention to Elgar, who was very much Strauss's English counterpart - a composer of oratorios instead of operas; symphonies and concertos rather than symphonic poems.
A series of three programmes with the Philharmonia ranges right across Elgar's output: Sea Pictures, Enigma Variations and Gerontius are to come, and in the opening concert on Thursday there was an overture, a concerto and a symphony.
Hickox has a wide-ranging repertoire, but he is something of an English specialist. He understands Elgar comprehensively. Under his control, the music flows naturally, breathes where it should and moves on at just the right intensity. All that was magnificently demonstrated in his account of the Second Symphony. This was Elgar as the quintessential Edwardian, keeping his emotions on a tight rein rather than letting them hang out, and remembering that a classical sense of form, derived from Brahms, was containing them.
The way in which Shelley's "spirit of delight", which according to Elgar informs the whole work, is disturbed in each of the first three movements by strange, malevolent ideas makes it much more elusive than it seems on the surface. This was beautifully captured in this performance. The best compliment you can pay a reading of the this symphony is that it comes across as one of the great symphonic masterpieces of the 20th century, a work as psychologically complex as anything by Mahler. It is certainly that - a fact that Hickox and the Philharmonia made utterly obvious.
Yet all his insights could not quite bring the early Froissart Overture to life. The material is not quite memorable enough, for all the backward echoes of later, greater music, to sustain such a rambling structure: Elgar himself thought the piece too long. And Truls Mork, the Norwegian conductor and soloist in the Cello Concerto, did not always seem of one mind about where the work's heart lay. His approach charged the lines with an edgy, neurotic quality that never really brought out the aching nostalgia in the slow movement. Hickox was more orthodox, more straightforward truer to the music, you might say.
