I’m watching a fascinating TV show about the Elgar Piano Concerto that has been cobbled together from sketches, recorded improvisations by Elgar himself on the piano, and the like, by a guy called Robert Walker.  Fascinating.  The resulting piece is about thirty five minutes long, after lots of cutting of the first version that Walker produced.  The creative process was fraught, and the pianist throughout it all, David Own Norris, and Robert Walker are still arguing about it.

Maybe Elgar would have made the final object as long and big as that actual original, but, unlike that actual original, good enough to last that long.  The violin concerto is fifty minutes long, after all.  But then again, I guess the cello concerto is only half an hour.

That such stories as this – another similar one is the ongoing saga of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony – now loom so large in the world of classical music tells you a lot about the state of classical music.  We are deep into the land of diminishing returns in exchange for unprecedentedly superhuman efforts.  The job of acquainting the big wide world with what all those decomposing composers composed is basically done, and they are scraping the barrel, occasionally finding either dubious fragments by an established master like Bach or Handel, Mahler or Elgar, and more commonly worthwhile unfamiliar stuff by lesser figures.  Sooner or later they will have to switch entirely to writing new stuff, and at that point they will have to understand what that involves, which I am convinced that most of them don’t at the moment.  More about that in the future.

But guess what, I have just ripped off a paragraph on that exact topic, by way of a tangent, and here it is.  Basically, the classical music fraternity has got to forget about “classical” music – a distinction that dates from the age of the Great Recording Project and which now makes less and less sense.  Instead, they must just make music.  Yes, some of the music will be “orchestral”, just as a mass of fine organ music has been written since the now long gone age when the organ, like the now equally dethroned symphony orchestra, was the King of the Instruments.  After all, all those organs still existed and were still perfectly playable, so it made sense to go on writing things for them.  But, the musicians mustn’t kid themselves that because their stuff may, what with being played on this peculiar thing called an orchestra, sometimes sound like Brahms, that it is the direct artistic descendant of e.g. the Brahms First Symphony, in the way that the Brahms First Symphony was itself the direct descendant of the Beethoven symphonies, which it was.  This is the equivalent of regarding Elizabeth II as Elizabeth I reborn.  Elizabeth II may wear similar robes to the ones Elizabeth I did, and have a similar title, and say similar words in public.  But there the similarity ends.

I have the Dutton recording of this Elgar/Walker Concerto, and have listened to it, once.  I was eager to hear it, if only because I so love the Elgar Piano Quintet.  Apparently, said the TV show, Elgar listened over and over again to a recording of the Quintet, when he was on his death bed.  How about that?

I did not much care for the Elgar/Walker concerto, but classical music seldom gets to me first time around, usually because I don’t listen to it carefully enough.  I’ll certainly give it another few goes, in fact I am giving it another go right now, because now they are playing it on the TV.  The trick is for me to stop fussing about how I wanted it to sound (a cross between the first Elgar symphony and the second Brahms piano concerto) and instead to listen to what it actually does sound like (first approximation: a cross between the second Elgar symphony and the Dvorak piano concerto – but please don’t quote that as if it was a considered judgement).

Already I am starting to like it more.  This is the kind of show that makes me wish I had a proper way of recording digital TV.