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Posted by John Quinn
on August 9, 2008, 1:24 pm, in reply to "Re: Elgar, Kennedy, Daniel"
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I finally caught up with this Nigel Kennedy performance through a recording of the television relay. The slow movement was hugely impressive, a really rapt account. I was also greatly taken with the performance of the cadenza in the finale; in fact I don't think I've heard it done better. However, I was much less impressed elsewhere. I think that there was too great a desire to impart a sense of urgency in the quicker music - and Kennedy's frequent foot stamping in the finale was terribly intrusive and, frankly, rather an affectation.
For me it was the first movement that failed most spectacularly. Indeed, when it was over I remarked to my wife that what we'd just heard sounded like "How fast can we play this?" I like spirit in Elgar and I most certainly don't want the music to drag but what we heard in many passages during this performance of the first movement was excessive haste. I don't know who was to blame, whether it was Kennedy or Paul Daniel or - most probably - the two of them, but time and again Elgar's music was put under impossible strain through the ridiculously fast tempi. Where was the sense of space? How I longed for the restraining wisdom of Vernon Handley, who was originally scheduled to conduct. As I type this I'm listening to the first movement in Kennedy's magnificent first recording with Handley giving an object lesson in how to conduct Elgar stylishly, with vigour combined with grandeur. This recording shows starkly what was lacking, I'm afraid, at the Proms.
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