COMPOSERS: Elgar
LABELS: Naxos
ALBUM TITLE: Elgar
WORKS: Enigma Variations; Dream Children; Sonatina
PERFORMER: Ashley Wass (piano)
CATALOGUE NO: 8.570166
For all their undeniable charm,
Elgar’s piano compositions are few
and mainly slight, often better-known
in other instrumental guises. So in
one sense Ashley Wass’s recital seems
an opportunity missed, since he omits
Elgar’s one moderately major original
piano work, the Concert Allegro, and
his most individual, In Smyrna. But
the principal focus of this disc is the
composer’s solo piano arrangement of
the Enigma Variations, and unlikely
as it might seem the music sounds
surprisingly effective in this form.
One misses, of course, the sustaining
power of strings in ‘Nimrod’, but
Wass characterizes all the variations
sharply (his tempo for ‘GRS’, the
Bulldog Dan variation, seems a mite
ponderous) and brings out all the
available keyboard colour on which
Elgar must have been relying. Nor
does his playing lack for orchestral
splendour of tone when called for, as it
is throughout the finale, for instance.
For the rest – delicacy of touch,
subtlety of pedalling, and Elgar’s melodic grace go quite far to make
Carissima, May Song, Dream
Children and the rest very palatable
as piano miniatures. This is salon
music of a very superior kind; and
the little Sonatina for the composer’s
niece Mary Grafton is a tiny gem.
Calum MacDonald