Elgar and Delius: Violin Concerto; Violin Concerto
Albert Sammons, violin; New Queen’s Hall Orchestra; Henry Wood, conductor (Elgar). Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra; Malcolm Sargent, conductor (Delius).
Naxos Historical 8.110951. Recorded 1929 (Elgar); 1944 (Delius). CD, 67:13.—There are recordings that belong to history, and then there are recordings that are history—documents so essential that their absence from any serious collection represents a genuine gap in understanding. This Naxos coupling falls squarely into the second category, and the fact that it arrives at budget price makes its appearance something close to an embarrassment of riches.
Albert Sammons. The name deserves to stand alone for a moment. Born in 1886, largely self-taught, he never pursued the international celebrity circuit that consumed so many of his contemporaries, and English music is the richer for it—because what he gave instead was an almost proprietary command of the native repertoire, a tone of burnished, nut-brown warmth that no recording quite captures fully but that these transfers come closer to than anything previously available. Mark Obert-Thorn has done splendid work here. The surfaces are clean, the violin sits in secure focus, and the dynamic range—from Sammons’s most hushed pianissimo to the surging full-bow fortissimos of the Elgar‘s first movement—registers with surprising fidelity for 1929 shellac.
The Elgar recording is the thing, really. It was the first uncut account to appear on disc, made three years before the young Menuhin came along and—through a combination of prodigious talent, Elgar’s own presence on the rostrum, and the accumulated mythology of that November 1932 session—rather permanently occupied the summit in public consciousness. That this happened is understandable. That Sammons consequently spent decades in and out of the catalog, heard mainly by specialists, is a small injustice that Naxos begins to correct.
Comparisons with Menuhin are inevitable, and they are genuinely illuminating rather than merely competitive. Menuhin at sixteen plays with an assurance that still astonishes—his tone finer, more ethereal, a will-o‘-the-wisp quality in the filigree writing of the first movement that suits the concerto’s more ruminative passages beautifully. Sammons is something else entirely. Forty-three years old at the time of this recording, with decades of English concert life behind him, he brings to the opening pages a rhetorical weight, an almost physical urgency, that announces immediately: this is a man who has lived with this music.
The first movement is where Wood’s conducting creates the most friction—and I mean that partly as a compliment. He presses forward with an energy that suits Sammons’s impetuous temperament, though there are moments, particularly in the long lyrical stretches before the development, where one longs for just a little more willingness to linger. Elgar himself, in the Menuhin recording, takes roughly two and a half minutes longer in this movement alone—and while mere clock times prove nothing, the difference in expressive latitude is audible. Wood’s urgency is bracing. Occasionally it feels like a slight imposition.
None of which diminishes what Sammons does with the solo part. The filigree passages—and there are pages of them—fall from his bow with a dexterity that seems almost casual, which is of course the mark of a truly great technician. But it is in the slow movement and the accompanied cadenza that the performance achieves something beyond mere excellence. That cadenza—wisely placed on its own track—is where Sammons separates himself. The tone darkens, the vibrato narrows slightly, and what emerges is a quality of nostalgic yearning that feels not performed but remembered. Menuhin, on the EMI Elgar Edition, plays it beautifully. Sammons plays it as though he knows what it costs.
The soprano-versus-mezzo analogy comes to mind: both voices luminous, both entirely valid, but fundamentally different in what they illuminate about the same music. I would not surrender either recording.
The Delius Violin Concerto is a different matter—a lovely work, frankly less interesting than the Elgar, prone in less capable hands to a kind of pleasant meandering that tests the patience. Sammons, who gave its premiere and for whom Delius wrote it after hearing him play the Elgar in concert, holds the line with characteristic authority. His tone above the stave is subtle and rhapsodic, and Sargent—who often gets less credit than he deserves as an orchestral trainer—provides accompaniment that is genuinely idiomatic, not merely competent. The Liverpool orchestra plays with real character; one thinks of the other fine Columbia and HMV recordings they made around this period, the premiere of Holst’s Hymn of Jesus, Sargent’s own Dream of Gerontius, Walton conducting Belshazzar‘s Feast. This was a serious ensemble in a serious moment.
Tully Potter’s liner notes are superb—characteristically thorough, historically grounded, and only occasionally prone to the kind of partisan advocacy that slightly overstates its case. His dismissal of the Menuhin recording as sounding “more like the work of a sixteen-year-old with each of its manifold reissues” is a good line, and it contains a kernel of truth about how familiarity can recalibrate perception. But it goes too far. Menuhin needs no apology.
What Sammons needs—and what this disc provides—is simply to be heard.
