Cello Concerto in E Minor

Elgar, unlike many of his countrymen, immediately saw the outbreak of the First World War as a calamity. He wrote several patriotic and would-be morale-boosting works in that period, but without the fire and conviction of his best pre-War work. His Cello Concerto, composed shortly after the War in 1919, frankly expresses his reaction to the devastation of a world he once thought he knew. It starts with a bold statement by the soloist, but rather than receiving a typical late-Romantic response from a full, surging orchestra, instead a modest wind quartet led by a clarinet plays a plaintive question ending with a subdued chord from the strings. With the soloist’s dispirited, questioning phrases, met by a ghostly, lilting theme from the strings (one of the Concerto’s most memorable), there is a feeling that we are entering forlorn and uncharted territory. The soloist then takes up the strings’ theme as if accepting it and leading the orchestra to an impassioned statement. There is playful brilliance later in the second movement scherzo, then gentle and rather melancholic reflection in the slow third movement. The finale’s rather grim start is met initially with defiance by the soloist, and for a while, it appears that a boisterous, dance-like conclusion is in sight. However, the soloist’s music shows signs of a despair that cannot be quelled; their music finally and frankly gives vent to the anguish beneath the concerto’s noble stoicism before a brusque recollection of the dance brings down the curtain.