Essential listening for the perfect pairing of composer and artist
The Strad Issue: February 2025
Description: Essential listening for the perfect pairing of composer and artist
Musicians: Albert Sammons (violin) William Murdoch (piano) New Queen’s Hall Orchestra, Studio Orchestra/Henry Wood.
Works: Elgar: Violin Concerto (1929 electric recording and 1916 abridged acoustic recording); Violin Sonata
Catalogue number: BIDDULPH 85054-2
Three times Albert Sammons (1886–1957) set the trend in Elgar interpretation. His main legacy is his nonpareil recording of the Violin Concerto, made in 1929 – I seem to be the only listener who rejects the 1932 version by the young Menuhin, with its jejune playing, slow tempos and indulgent conducting.
Wood imparts a sense of urgency from the start and when Sammons enters he takes charge: the virtuosity in faster passages, with lavish portamentos (lovely!), is all directed to putting over his dramatic view of the music, the second subject has a speaking, improvisatory quality and the movement ends in a blaze. Wood’s introductory bars in the Andante are tender, solicitous; Sammons’s tone is full but not thick; his pianissimo is memorable.
In the third movement he takes off like a rocket, he and Wood are marvellously rhythmical, with Sammons encompassing every mood from tenderness to triumph, crowned by a superb cadenza. There is nothing pompous about this performance. It is as authentically historic as, say, Anja Ignatius’s Sibelius.
Six years later in Elgar’s Violin Sonata, Sammons is palpably older at almost 49, but he makes much of the double-stops in the Allegro. In the Romance, he catches its wistful quality and the finale is commandingly played by both him and his superb Australian partner.
The 1916 abridged Violin Concerto is like one of those samples that furniture salesmen used to take round to show clients, small and perfectly formed, reducing a huge work by two-thirds. Nine months later Elgar recorded his own similar version with Marie Hall, providing a special harp accompaniment for the cadenza: she fiddled superbly but Sammons had the edge. This is an essential disc, as the 78rpm transfers are excellent.
TULLY POTTER
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