Classical Companion

We have to admit that, at present at any rate, Elgar does not travel,' noted the much respected Gramophone reviewer Trevor Harvey, in 1964. He was writing about one of Sir Adrian Boult's less well known recordings of the Symphony No 2, made with the Scottish National Orchestra and issued on the Waverley label.

Rummaging through a box of unsorted CDs I came across a 1972 orchestral concert by the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra [Scribendum SC 004]. The conductor was Rudolf Kempe, one of my most admired artists but someone I hadn't written about in this HFN series we began in July '14. (Incidentally, the soloist there, in Mozart's Piano Concerto K595, was Friedrich Gulda, liberally sprinkling decoration over his part, whereas his DG studio recording with VPO/Abbado is almost bereft of it.)

I guess the Fifth Symphony is the work that makes listeners sit up and begin to explore the music of Beethoven. Its opening dot-dot-dot-dash motif was used by the Allies as a Victory emblem for broadcasts to occupied Europe.

Anyone who has seen the 1945 British film classic Brief Encounter will remember the music that enhanced the performances by the two principal stars, Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard – Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto. (The pianist for the soundtrack was Eileen Joyce.)

Kirill Petrenko's two September Prom concerts and, a few months earlier at The Barbican, a Mahler Seventh, suggest a promising new chapter opening for the Berliner Philharmoniker – as we Brits must learn to call it, the German title now unerlässlich.

For the violinist Itzhak Perlman, and others of his generation, the subject of this month's Classical Companion was a deity – 'I can't believe it. I'm talking to God – to Heifetz' he said of first meeting him when he was 14. But as Jascha Heifetz died in 1987, perhaps he's just a name on a CD cover to today's aspiring young violinists.