What Elgar means to me
As a youngster, I had something of a "conversion experience" in respect of Elgar's music at a very early age. I immersed myself in its mysteries, visiting the then palatial showrooms of Novello and Company on my first solo visit to London in my early teens to obtain the numerous analytical guides then available to the Enigma Variations and the three oratorios - the latter the work of Elgar's Nimrod, publishing editor Augustus Jaeger. My parents sent me to the Three Choirs' Festival annually and the vivid performances of those days, especially those directed by Dr Herbert Sumsion and Dr Melville Cook, linger long in the memory. I heard other repertoire too, of course, and from that period stand out - besides all of the Elgar! - an electrifying Elijah under Dr Sumsion and a wonderful War Requiem conducted by Dr Cook; I never dreamt that a decade and a half later I would be in post as Dr Cook's successor-but-one at the Parish Church of Leeds.
Major influences abounded elsewhere - particularly in the form of the BBC Monitor Film by Ken Russell and the magical Worcester Cathedral LP in the early days of Christopher Robinson of Elgar's Church Music. It seems incredible to us now that in the early 60s so very little of Elgar's music was part of our normal experience. How different, and how much better, things are nowadays.
Towards the close of my tenure at St Albans I was privileged to receive an invitation from the BBC to perform the Elgar Organ Sonata at the 1975 Proms at the Royal Albert Hall - broadcast live on Radio Three in absolutely sweltering temperatures. I think the programme planners had decided to have the work and the choice fell on myself as then the current resident organist for the BBC Chorus in central London who had tackled a full Elgar programme with Martindale Sidwell at the Church of St George the Martyr Queen Square on a fine old organ, but one not totally suited to the repertoire, I remember! I returned to the marvellous BBC musicians more than twenty years later for a programme of Edwardian music for choir and organ, including Elgar's Great is the Lord [Psalm 48], with the BBC Singers under Stephen Cleobury at St Paul's Knightsbridge.
The Prom concert was one of my first public engagements after appointment to Leeds and a task that brought me immense pleasure as well as one involving a lot of hard work. Dr Sumsion and Simon Preston had, between them, rehabilitated the Elgar Organ Sonata some few years earlier though - perhaps incredibly - I only heard their recordings after having undertaken my Prom performance. The work preceded David Bedford's Twelve Hours of Sunset and the second half was the great Sir Adrian Boult conducting Brahms's fourth symphony. Truly an evening to remember.
More Elgar followed in the late 1970s and early 1980s - much of it in collaboration with my immediate Leeds precursor, Dr Donald Hunt, who has the music well and truly in his bones as well as in his creative soul. Work at the Leeds Phil with Meredith Davies was another inspiration.
I have played the mighty organ parts in all the major Elgar works on many occasions, and even accompanied The Dream of Gerontius on the organ alone some half a dozen times.
It has been my privilege to conduct Gerontius twice at the Parish Church - in 2000, the year of the centenary of the first Birmingham performance and this Good Friday, 2007 in the year of the composer's 150th birthday.
One the most fulfilling collaborations of the present Elgar celebrations was a concert by the Elgar Chorale of Worcester under Donald Hunt at the Parish Church in Leeds early in March 2007. The Chorale was joined by St Peter's Singers in Dr Hunt's magical Hymnus Paschalis and Elgar's Give unto the Lord [Psalm 29] and the Chorale much other Elgar on their own, together with works by Herbert Sumsion and Howard Blake written specially for this acclaimed chamber choir.