Output details

David Owen Norris plays Elgar, volume 2: Transcriptions, Falstaff, Pomp & Circumstmce nos. 1-6

Research content/process:

This project engages with three questions: the performance of Sigfrid Karg-Elert’s transcriptions of Elgar’s orchestral music; the retranscription and performance of works already arranged; and the textual status of the sixth ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ March. Karg-Elert’s piano transcription of Elgar’s Symphonic Study Falstaff had languished in the British Library (but not in its catalogue) for many years, mainly because, as Karg-Elert noted on the MS, he finished it on the third day of mobilization in August 1914. Karg-Elert’s Falstaff takes the piano transcription close to its technical limits of complexity. Norris brings to the transcription his experience of working with Elgar’s own transcription and improvisation practices to make sense of parts of Karg-Elert’s work that are unplayable (shape notes below the stave for example). In doing so he makes a case for the aesthetic importance of all types of transcription. Three of the five existing ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ Marches had already been transcribed, but neither by Elgar or by anyone with an appreciation of Elgar’s methods or aesthetic of transcription. Norris retranscribes and performs the works in ways that would have been familiar to Elgar and to audiences of the Edwardian period. The sixth March remains in sketch form and was completed by Anthony Payne in 2006; new sketches have since emerged that enabled Norris to review and recast the work and then to transcribe and perform it with the rest of the set, thus engaging in an unparalleled musical embodiment of textual criticism. Norris’s approach to Elgar’s transcriptions is published as ‘Character as form: Elgar's Falstaff’, in Let Beauty Awake: Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Literature, ed. Julian Rushton (London: Elgar Editions, 2010) 32-42.