This, the second volume in Elgar Editions’ series devoted
to the piano music, or, as in this second volume, to transcriptions
for piano. The earlier
disc took
in the Five Improvisations, Sonatina, Imperial March, In Smyrna,
Three Bavarian Dances, Serenade, the Concert Allegro Op. 46 and
sundry other small things but there is a rival series of sorts
on Naxos in which Ashley Wass has already given us a transcription
of the
Enigma
Variations. On
Somm
069 we also have Mark Bebbington playing the First Symphony
arranged for Piano by Sigfrid Karl-Elert. Really I’ve no
idea who is buying these discs - one would have thought they’re
aimed at the more niche market, whatever that might be - but
I’m glad at least that they exist.
The Pomp and Circumstance Marches - all six - are heard in the
arrangements made by David Owen Norris. Pre-established transcriptions
of most of them - obviously not the new Sixth - exist but Owen
Norris’s work sounds very authentic and realistic, even
pianistic. The Sixth is his work by the way, not that of Anthony
Payne, who has also worked on it and to rather more extensive
effect. Owen Norris has confined himself to rather more in the
way of elasticised sketchwork and at three minutes in length
- the other Marches are twice that - it sounds rather perfunctory.
Elsewhere he plays the First’s central panel with sensitivity
and a certain, welcome understatement, but his playing is full
of clarity. The C minor is dispatched with panache and brio but
it’s the Fourth, most people’s favourite, I suppose,
that works best. The sonorous rolled chords before the great
tune are a tonic. In the C major Owen Norris brings out the quirkiness
of the writing, its caprice and wit as well as its grand panoply.
Whilst this is diverting, or disappointing in the case of No.6
- about which I’m dubious to say the least - Falstaff is
the real meat in the programme. In another Karg-Elert arrangement
we find the angularity of the writing, its off-kilter quality,
is arresting and disconcerting. In a formally difficult and complex
programmatic work such as this a piano arrangement serves a valued
function, though so masterly is Elgar’s orchestration that
Karg-Elert’s work can only serve as a kind of reduced rapprochement
with the real thing. The visionary orchestral writing is necessarily
rendered mute, and it’s more as a systemic analysis that
we listen to the results of an arrangement such as this. This
is a dilemma that Owen Norris locates in his notes to this release,
fastening on a comment made by Christa Landon in another context
regarding the ‘essential musical substance of a masterpiece.’
If the ‘musical substance’ appeals, then this skeletal
reduction will serve well. It’s certainly splendidly played
and conveyed.
Jonathan Woolf
David Owen Norris (piano) 
