Vaughan Williams and Elgar – Michael Stern

Kansas City is not the first place one thinks to look for Elgar, and that alone makes this disc worth a detour.

Michael Stern, son of the violinist everyone of a certain age remembers fondly, has built something genuinely responsive in the Midwest, and his Enigma Variations proves it. This is a spacious reading, unhurried, sometimes to the point of risk. It begins that way too: “C.A.E.” unfolds with an amplitude that tells you immediately Stern is not going to rush anybody through anything. Some will find this indulgent. I found it, mostly, persuasive.

The strings don’t quite have the tonal heft you want in the big tuttis. There’s clarity, real clarity, but not always the sumptuous welling-up Elgar’s harmonic language seems to demand, that sense of a string section breathing as one organism. Barbirolli had it. Boult had it, differently, in his austere way. Stern’s players give you precision instead: articulate part-writing, a chamber-player’s care for inner voices. That’s not nothing.

Christine Grossman’s viola solo in “Isabel” has an autumnal wistfulness that stayed with me longer than I expected. Mark Gibbs’s cello in “B.G.N.” (the Elgar/Basil Nevinson movement so many listeners quietly prefer to “Nimrod”) is oddly reserved, even a little cool, when the music wants to ache. And then there’s “Nimrod” itself. Stern takes it broad, very broad, broader than Vernon Handley would ever have countenanced, and I confess my first reaction was mild alarm. My internal metronome for this piece was set decades ago by Monteux’s old Boston album and has never quite reset. But slowly the tempo won me over, until the seam into the following variation, which sounds momentarily unglued, the transition exposed rather than bridged. A small price. The finale, “E.D.U.,” has genuine backbone and swagger, Stern finally letting the orchestra off the leash.

The engineering is the real star here, frankly. This is Bob Attiyeh/John Newton-caliber work. Actually it’s Prof. Keith Johnson’s 24-bit engineering, and it is extraordinary: depth, air, a percussion section that snaps without ever turning etched, an organ pedal at the close that you feel through the floor rather than merely hear. Wind choirs register with a bloom that never smears detail. Rarely has a modern American orchestra been captured so flatteringly, so truthfully.

The Vaughan Williams fillers are the disc’s quiet justification. The Wasps almost never gets performed complete. You get the overture on pops concerts and that’s usually that, so hearing the whole Aristophanic Suite, with its skittering March and the earthy, folk-inflected Entr’acte, is a genuine pleasure. The sonics let you hear exactly how VW voices his winds against pizzicato strings, a texture too often reduced to mush. The overture itself lacks the sheer comic verve, the rhythmic bite, that Previn drew from the LSO back in the analogue era; Stern’s version is polite by comparison, well-mannered where Previn was unbuttoned. The Fantasia on “Greensleeves” closes things sweetly, harp and strings folding into that old modal tune like a lullaby nobody wants to end.

Not a first choice for the Elgar. Barbirolli, Boult, and Monteux still own that ground, each for different reasons. But it’s a rewarding, beautifully engineered alternative, and an indispensable one if you want The Wasps uncut and glowing.