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Edward Elgar (1857–1934),
arr. Ivor Atkins (1869–1953)

Organ Sonata No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 87a (from ‘Severn Suite’) (1930, arr. 1932)

FIRST PERFORMANCE AT THE PROMS

1 Introduction: Pomposo
2 Toccata: Allegro molto
3 Fugue: Andante – Cadenza (Atkins) – Coda

In 1930, when Elgar was in his early seventies, he was asked to write a test-piece for the 25th National Brass Band Championship, held at Crystal Palace. The problem was that Elgar hadn’t completed a single substantial work since the Cello Concerto, 11 years earlier. The death of his wife Alice in 1920 pulled away his most important personal and artistic life supports. The huge cultural change following the end of the First World War only enhanced Elgar’s feeling that he was yesterday’s man – the embodiment in music of an age the new Britain seemed desperate to forget.

Dragging Elgar out of the slough of self-doubt was never easy, but the new commission made him look again at sketches he had never fully worked out. These brought back vivid memories of younger days, and particularly of the valley of his beloved River Severn near Worcester, his childhood home. The idea of developing these into a kind ‘Severn Suite’ was given a helpful nudge when the commissioners suggested that the brass specialist Henry Geehl should do the orchestration – thus one element of potential drudgery was removed.

Geehl and Elgar did not hit it off, personally or professionally. Geehl made things worse by bluntly dismissing many of Elgar’s suggestions for orchestration (‘usually unworkable’ was Geehl’s verdict); but many of these have subsequently been shown to be not only practical but highly imaginative. The fact that the Severn Suite has never quite caught on with brass bands may well be more Geehl’s fault than Elgar’s.

Still, working on the Severn Suite was a valuable experience for Elgar. Creative energy started flowing again. Soon afterwards he was able to write the Fifth Pomp and Circumstance March, and the very appealing Nursery Suite; and not long after that he began work on his Third Symphony: for many years the sketches for this work were dismissed as the work of a tired mind but, as Anthony Payne’s magnificent completion has revealed, it shows Elgar once again working at full power. The Severn Suite was clearly a crucial stage in that final resurrection.

Dissatisfied with the brass-band version of the Severn Suite, Elgar made his own orchestration in 1931–2, giving the five movements titles linking them closely to the city of Worcester. But the music was also given new life in this afternoon’s arrangement for organ by Elgar’s close friend Ivor Atkins, organist at Worcester Cathedral from 1897 to 1950, thus providing another important like with Elgar’s home city. Elgar and Atkins spent several sessions working on the arrangement together, with the end result that the five-movement Severn Suite became a three- movement organ sonata, with a cadenza by Atkins, and a condensed version of Elgar’s original coda.

The first movement is entitled ‘Worcester Castle’ in Elgar’s orchestral version, the grand first theme evoking the castle’s great and colourful past. A livelier form of pageantry is evoked in the rapid toccata second movement – ‘Tournament’ in the Suite – then a solemn, dignified fugue (transposed by Atkins from C minor to B flat minor) portrays the great cathedral – apparently this music was originally conceived as a fugue for solo organ and, as with the first two movements, it does transcribe very effectively. Atkins’s cadenza is on the whole more reflective than virtuosic, but the return to the sonata’s first theme is handled impressively, making the coda’s structural rounding off all the more convincing.

Programme note © Stephen Johnson

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