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The Guardian, April 2010

Recorded in 2007 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, these performances were part of an Elgar cycle that Andrew Davis conducted with the Philharmonia to mark the 150th anniversary of the composer's birth. Davis has made studio recordings of both symphonies with the BBC Symphony Orchestra for Warner Classics, and those are now available at budget price. At first sight that might make these recordings surplus to requirements. However, there is plenty to admire, especially in Davis's account of the First Symphony. His approach to Elgar seems more reflective than before, wistful almost now, and that quality suffuses his account of the First in a haunting way, with the closeup recording catching the refinement of the Philharmonia's playing perfectly. The Second Symphony, however, does not reveal its secrets as convincingly.

Andrew Clements

ClassicalSource.com, May 2010

The recordings issued here have been taken from a series of concerts given by the Philharmonia Orchestra and Sir Andrew Davis to celebrate the 150th-anniversary of Sir Edward Elgar. Already issued on Signum are Enigma Variations, Serenade for Strings, and In the South, and on ONYX the Violin Concerto with James Ehnes also coupled with the Serenade for Strings. The Cello Concerto with Truls Mørk, as well as the Violin Concerto and Froissart are available as downloads from the Philharmonia Orchestra's website and, to complicate matters, Symphony No.1, In the South and Enigma Variations are available as well, only as downloads, from Decca Classics.

The 33 year-old Elgar's Froissart was first performed to much acclaim at the Three Choirs Festival in 1890. Elgar himself conducted for this Worcester performance, his first notable success. Inspired by Jean Froissart's 14th-century chronicles, the overture gets a bold, swaggering, yet sensitive performance from the Philharmonia and Andrew Davis, fully at one with the quotation from Keats at the head of the score: "When Chivalry lifted up her lance on high."

The First Symphony was premièred in Manchester under Hans Richter at the end of 1908 and was very well received; at its first London performance at the Queen's Hall a few days later, also under Richter, the reception was tumultuous. Davis and the Philharmonia produce a good performance, the conductor unwilling to linger too long on some passages, keen to keep the work as a whole in sight. The opening 'motto' theme, which reappears, is played quite plainly but the mood deepens as the movement progresses, the key-changes dealt with very effectively. The second movement shows the quality of the Philharmonia's strings off with fine playing and the music's vivaciousness is nicely caught. The Adagio comes across with tranquillity and some excellent contributions from the wind. The finale's introduction is suitably mysterious in its reflections of the opening movement, and the highpoint of the movement glistens. Though perhaps not as effective as Solti in his superb studio account for Decca, one of his finest achievements, Davis produces a cogent reading.

The Second Symphony was premièred just two-and-a-half years later, Elgar conducting at the Queen's Hall. Dedicated to the recently deceased King Edward VII, the work was received quite well, though Elgar was disappointed, remarking "What is the matter with them, Billy? They sit there like a lot of stuffed pigs." (Billy being W. H. Reed, the leader of the London Symphony Orchestra.) Under the circumstances, perhaps the composer was too sensitive, the audience may have treated the work more as a memorial for the late king, or were profoundly affected by the extraordinarily moving ending.

Andrew Davis's performance of 20 April 2007 is very fine indeed. He and the Philharmonia have the ebb and flow of Elgar's writing sounding entirely naturally and this work receives the finest playing in this series. The passion in the writing is made alive and all the more successful by Davis's careful attention to dynamics. The first (and longest) movement leads to a firm and confident climax, admirably caught. The second movement, a funeral march, epitomises Elgar's writing with reflection and mourning losses. Again, Davis's shaping is wholly sensitive to the writing. Does the Spirit of Delight appear in the third-movement scherzo? If it does, it is a fleeting visit, for the mood is often one of unsmiling glee. Here, the brass comes over extremely well. The finale has plenty of atmosphere; its climax, a piercing solo for trumpet, is extremely effective. The work ends most movingly and quietly with rapt playing from the orchestra, a magical moment. The audience seems in spellbound silence, although applause should have been removed; nevertheless, this is a very impressive performance.

During the series of concerts, the Royal Festival Hall was undergoing refurbishment, and the performances took place in the smaller Queen Elizabeth Hall. I did find the size of acoustic much greater in these recordings than expected. Indeed, Froissart is too reverberant (artificially added?), though the Second Symphony sounds more natural and very well recorded. This set can be recommended wholeheartedly.

Peter Joelson

BBC Music Magazine, June 2010
Performance ****
Recording ****

Andrew Davis' second Elgar disc in this Signum series of live performances with the Philharmonia is as good as if not better than his first (Enigma, In the South, Serenade) and a great deal weightier, since the two symphonies are the pinnacle of Elgar's musical thought. They are superb performances, with plenty of electricity and sense of occasion, well deserving the enthusiastic audience applause. The sublime and tragic Larghetto of No. 2 in particular is wonderfully well-paced, with the poignant oboe countermelody at 7:16 perfectly integrated into the soundscape as a whole.

If I don't go on to recommend these versions whole-heartedly, it's because there are so many contenders of equal, and some of superior, merit. Davis's previous accounts of the symphonies with the BBCSO on Teldec are, I think, equally good. And for all the fire and intelligence of these new interpretations with the Philharmonia there's a slight beefiness, a bluntness or thickness of sound, that helps the big moments to come over with great force but is somehow at odds with the tense, sinewy, living-on-one's nerves quality that Elgar himself always brought to his music. It suits Froissart, however, down to the ground, and it receives a sterling performance.

In many ways, Elgar's own interpretations (now on Naxos) have never been surpassed, but the elderly sound, though very good for its time, cannot match modern rivals. The best No. 1's to go for, in my view, remain Solti and the LSO (Decca) and Colin Davis's truly outstanding version with the Dresden Staatskapelle (Profil), also a live performance though the cavernous Semperoper acoustic, which coarsens some climaxes, will not be to everyone's taste, and Davis has become as vocal as Barbirolli, whose wonderfully expansive 1964 version of No. 2 with the Halle still occupies a special place in my affections, as does Jeffrey Tate's exceptionally powerful reading with the LSO (both on EMI).

Calum MacDonald

Music-Web International, May 2010

Andrew Davis previously recorded the two Elgar symphonies with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1991 and 1992. Originally released on the Teldec label in superb sound, the performances were widely praised. Those readings are currently available on Apex for around a fiver each in English money. Now along comes this two-disc set, recorded live in concert, and released by Signum as part of their association with the Philharmonia Orchestra. (I reviewed some months ago a very fine Elgar/Davis disc in the same series featuring the "Enigma" Variations.) The cost comes to about half as much again as the Apex discs. So the question for admirers of Elgar and Andrew Davis is which are the ones to choose?

The first thing to note is that in terms of overall conception, as a glance at the timings of each movement suggests, the readings, separated by sixteen years, are remarkably consistent. Beware, however, the printed timings of the first disc, which shave nearly fourteen minutes off the total. The A flat major symphony gets off to a fine start with a noble slow introduction, resplendent in sound when the theme is repeated by the full orchestra. The Allegro is powerful and is characterised, as are all these performances, by Davis's familiar mastery of Elgarian style. The scherzo goes very well and only very few allowances need be made for the pressures of live performance in those fiendishly scurrying string parts. The slow movement is delivered with a most moving restraint, and the finale is brilliantly dispatched, its closing pages – which rarely fail – extremely exciting. So far so good, but I was left with a nagging feeling that this performance was less involving than it should have been. I think Davis might have pushed harder at the main climax of the first movement and there are several points in the performance where he seems unwilling to give the orchestra their head. The woodwind phrasing in the famous passage in the scherzo – "Play it like something you hear down by the river", said Elgar – seems self-conscious and the conductor's decision to relax the tempo here leads to a bit of slightly mannered braking when the theme returns a second time. These performers don't quite convince us that the musical material of much of the finale – lots of sequences – is up to much, and this at a very fast tempo indeed. And then there is the problem of the sound, very analytical and close, making it difficult for the performers to cast the requisite spell in the magical passage with solo violin in the first movement, and particularly in the slow movement, which begins several notches above pianissimo and seems too loud almost throughout. None of these doubts arise from Davis's earlier recording where, curiously, given its studio provenance, the music making seems hotter and more spontaneous.

Sadly, these feelings are confirmed by the performance of the later work. This has one of the most terrific openings in all music, and let me say that no listener would think otherwise when listening to this performance. But with Davis in 1992, at a near-identical tempo, the playing is even tauter, the brass crescendos more dramatic, the sensational horn arpeggios in the seventh and eighth bars more clearly articulated and impetuous. In short, everything that launches this remarkable symphony on an unsuspecting public is more vivid and exciting. At other points in this first movement, where one hopes for mystery one finds calm, and where excitement should begin to mount – the lead up to the end of the movement, for example – the music can seem placid. A refusal to linger in the sublime slow movement might be seen as a virtue, especially when placed beside some of the more over-affectionate readings available, but there is more drama in the music than is to be found here. These two movements are surely amongst the finest music Elgar ever composed, which cannot really be said for the two remaining ones. There's a fair amount of padding in the scherzo, but the climax of the movement and the lead into it are astonishing. Elgar himself once addressed an orchestra thus: "… my music represents a man in high fever … Percussion … I want you gradually to drown the rest of the orchestra." What are we to make of this? Did he mean it literally? In this performance it is the brass and the percussion which drown the rest of the orchestra, and the result relentless and unpleasant. The closing pages of the finale are wonderful, of course, and Elgar's way with the return of the music from the opening of the work is masterly and most moving, but it seems tacked on, so weak and inconsequential is much of the music which precedes it. Davis manages no better than other conductors in convincing us otherwise, though, for this listener at least, one conductor did. Again, the earlier performance is more successful at all these points.

The first disc is completed by a fine performance of the early concert overture, Froissart.

These performances were recorded in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and though it is many years since I attended a concert there, I can't help thinking that it must be far from ideal for a full symphony orchestra. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why all concerned seem less engaged with the music than one would expect, especially in concert. In any event I think it must certainly explain the sound. The presentation is fine, and includes a highly readable and informative booklet essay signed M. Ross.

For those seeking recordings of Elgar's symphonies the choice is very wide. Barbirolli was a very subjective conductor, and his readings, which I adore, will not please everybody. Of similar vintage, several recorded performances by Boult are available, his mastery of large-scale structures unsurpassed. Solti profited from studying the composer's own recorded performances before setting down his wonderfully exciting readings with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Two fascinating and typically idiosyncratic performances from Sinopoli are well worth investigating, and I recently made acquaintance with Charles Mackerras's performances, a remarkable bargain on Eloquence, and surely amongst the finest of all. Only one conductor has convinced me in the finale of the Second Symphony, however, though I am at a lost to explain how he does it. This is Edward Downes, with the BBC Philharmonic, on Naxos, and the rest of the performance is very fine indeed too. And then there are Andrew Davis's earlier performances, outstanding, generously coupled, and though I say this with some regret, wanting to encourage the enterprise of this Signum series, preferable in most respects to these new performances.

William Hedley

Editors Choice – Gramophone Magazine

As coincidence would have it, these unearthed 2007 live Elgar performances are issued at the same time as another Elgar First, from the previous decade under the other great English Elgarian, Vernon Handley. Both are marvellous but I have always found, as does our reviewer, Davis live to find an extra depth in Elgar. Here his intensity is gripping, even frightening. Great performances and a real sense of occasion.

James Inverne, Editor - Gramophone, August 2010

(Comparative Review)
Andrew Davis's new recordings of the Elgar symphonies along with the early Froissart Overture were recorded live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 2007, the year the Royal Festival Hall was being refurbished. The first gain is that the sound has more bloom on it than it would have had in the dry larger hall. Even more important, the comparison with Davis's earlier recordings with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, made in the studio and now reissued at super-budget price on Warner Apex, is that, as so often with Davis, a live occasion brings out an extra intensity. For example, the pause' before the final rush of the coda in the first movement of the Second Symphony is significantly longer, making a greater impact.

Generally, in both symphonies Davis allows himself greater freedom in his use of rubato, phrasing wanniy, so that the lovely third theme of the slow movement in the First Symphony is even more tender, and though the playing in both symphonies is marginally less polished in the live performance, the Elgarian thrust is greater and the sound fuller and more immediate. Also, the final coda of the finale in the First Symphony is even more thrilling, though all these differences are only marginal. The Froissart Overture, dating from early in Elgar's career, is also richly done.

In the First Symphony Vemon Handley's live version on the LPO's own label originally issued in an Elgar box and now reissued as a separate disc, coupled with Dame Janet Baker's superb account of Sea Pictures - comes in surprisingly warm sound. Handley, an equally fine, idiomatic Elgarian, gives a reading just as rich and moving, with timings surprisingly similar to those of Davis. The Scherzo is particularly clean and well sprung. Those who just want the First Symphony may even prefer it to the Davis performances because of the coupling. In effect collectors can hardly go wrong with either of these recordings, both offering marvellous evidence of Elgar's mastery.

Edward Greenfield