Post by Andrew ClarkePost by KerrisonSome of the finest Elgar performances come from non-British conductors. You mention the 2nd Symphony so here it is conducted by Vasily Petrenko. The music may not be to your liking but his performance is just great, as is confirmed by many of the comments under the video ...
http://youtu.be/f8cUFZ2T0X0
Similarly, Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra playing "In the South" put all the British performances in the shade. No wonder the audience started applauding before the last chord was over ...
http://youtu.be/t-ZKmVHfgac
Here is another Russian, the inimitable Gennady Rozhdestvensky, conducting the "Enigma Variations" at the London Proms in 2007 ... Evidently he was a great non-rehearser but it doesn't show in this performance ...
http://youtu.be/cKnfRpJ6f4c
Hope you like!
I'm sure "the Brits" are happy to see that Elgar - who generally doesn't travel well - is or has been taken up by non-British conductors. The trouble is, it doesn't seem to happen very often. The other Petrenko - Kirill - has performed the Elgar Second with the Berlin Phil, as discussed here, but it was subsequently found that the previous performance of this work by this orchestra was thirty years ago!
It might be interesting to look at performances/recordings of American music by non-American conductors. Without having looked into this, I'd guess that Copland, Bernstein, Glass and Adams would do relatively well. But Schuman? Piston? even Barber (apart from *that* Adagio)? Ives?
Andrew Clarke
Canberra
Out of curiosity I checked the Berlin Philharmonic digital concert
(video) archive, which goes back about 20 years but probably not
thoroughly in the earlier years.
Elgar appears 16 times, but 5 are short works and 3 more are with Rattle.
The remainder are woth non-British conductors (perhaps influenced by
Rattle as music director): Barenboim doing Falstaff, Dfream of
Gerontius and the Cello Concerto (Weilerstein), both Mehta and
Zinman doint the Violin Concerto, Runnicles with the first Symphony
and K. Petrenko with the second. (Yes, Runnicles is Scottish,
but spent most of his career outside Britain.)
Ives appears 5 times, but 2 are The Unanswered Question, and one is the
Concord Sonata in a recital by Aimard. Daniel Harding (British) has
conducted Three Places in New Englnad, and, most impressively, Ingo
Metzmacher has conducted the 4th Symphony (with Aimard on Piano).
As Andrew suggested, Adams and Bernstein are well-represented, but
most of the Bernstein is Broadway-related. Barber apperas 3 times,
all for you know what. No Piston, Schuman, Thomson, Thompson, Foss,
etc. The index also shows no Copland, but that seems to be wrong.
Most interesting is a Mehta-conducted Crumb's Ancient Voices of
Children (with Marlis Petersen, soprano).
FWIW. :)
--
Al Eisner