There is a Spanish epigraph at the head of Elgar’s Violin Concerto — “Aquí está encerrada el alma de …” — and the blank that follows those five words has generated more biographical speculation than almost anything else in English music. Whose soul is enshrined there? Alice Stuart-Wortley, the “Windflower”? Some amalgam of women Elgar admired, or half-loved? The composer’s own restless, socially anxious inner life? The mystery is probably intentional, and it matters, because this concerto — enormous in scale, nearly fifty minutes long, Brahmsian in its structural ambition yet unmistakably Elgar in its harmonic idiom — demands from its performers a commitment to emotional candor that no mere technical brilliance can supply.
It is a peculiar work. Elgar finished it in 1910, at the absolute summit of his public reputation, yet the concerto feels like a private communication, almost embarrassingly so in places. The first movement’s second subject — that long, arching, inward-turning melody in the violins — sounds less like rhetoric than confession. Then the finale, with its famous “accompanied cadenza” in which muted orchestral strings shimmer beneath the soloist’s improvisation-like outpouring: there is nothing quite like it anywhere, not even in Elgar.
Catherine Manoukian — Canadian-born, relatively little known on the international circuit — meets all of this head-on. Her tone is warm without being fat, her vibrato varied and purposeful rather than reflexive. In the first movement she takes her time with the lyrical material, but never so much that the architecture sags; the development is taut, forward-pressing, the bowing arm generating a clean, unforced intensity. This is not a soloist straining after effect.
The Staatskapelle Weimar is not an orchestra most American listeners will know. Founded in 1491 — which makes it the second oldest orchestra in the world, trailing only the Dresden Staatskapelle — it spent the decades after 1945 largely isolated behind the Iron Curtain, off the major recording circuits, absent from the international touring calendar that built reputations for Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin. That obscurity is genuinely puzzling once you hear them. The string sound here is burnished and deep-chested, with a particular richness in the lower registers — cellos and basses that actually anchor the texture rather than simply filling space beneath the violins. The winds have character. The brass are present without bluster.
Stefan Solyom conducts. And here the recording’s essential secret reveals itself — Manoukian is Solyom’s wife. One could be cynical about that. One shouldn’t be. What it means in practice, on this live recording, is a degree of interpretive unity that is simply not achievable through rehearsal alone. The orchestra breathes with the soloist. Solyom adjusts tempo with the kind of intuitive flexibility that usually takes years of touring a concerto together to develop. The slow movement — that vast, nocturnal Andante — unfolds as if the orchestra is listening to itself dream, and Manoukian floats above it all without ever seeming to float away.
Compare this to some of the more celebrated recent recordings and the differences are instructive. Nikolaj Znaider — who made headlines by using Fritz Kreisler’s own Guarneri for his release — brought tremendous authority and a certain grandeur that impressed enormously. But grandeur is a double-edged thing in this concerto; Elgar’s music can curdle under too much of it, the private voice overwhelmed by the public gesture. Philippe Graffin, working from the original manuscript, found fascinating textual variants but occasionally seemed more interested in the archaeology than the music. Manoukian and Solyom are after something else — not a gimmick, not a concept, just the piece itself.
The two shorter works that complete the disc are affectionate rather than revelatory. Salut d’Amour — the op. 12 trifle that Elgar sold outright to his publisher for a pittance, then spent years watching generate royalties he’d never see — gets a gracious, unhurried reading. The Offertoire, op. 11, is even less familiar, a sacred salon piece of some charm. Manoukian plays both with evident pleasure and a lovely, unforced sweetness. They serve their purpose as encores.
But it is the concerto that justifies everything here. This recording — live, a single performance with some patching, apparently — has the electricity of an occasion. You can hear it in the hall silence between movements, in the slight catch of bow on string at the very opening of the finale, in the way the cadenza seems to genuinely happen rather than be delivered. Elgar’s enshrined soul, whoever it belonged to, is in good hands.
