Duration
The composer's 1931 EMI recording of the First Symphony plays for 46 minutes and 30 seconds. The BBC's archives show that in a 1930 broadcast performance Elgar took 46 minutes. Elgar was noted for his brisk tempi in his own music, and later performances have been slower. Elgar's contemporaries, Sir Henry Wood and Sir Hamilton Harty took respectively 50:15 (1930) and 59:45 in 1940. In 1972, while preparing a new recording, Georg Solti studied Elgar's 1931 performance. Solti's fast tempi, based on the composer's own, came as a shock to Elgarians accustomed to the broader tempi taken by Harty, Sir John Barbirolli and others in the mid-20th century. Barbirolli's 1963 recording takes 53:53; Solti takes 48:48. Later examples of slower tempi include a 1992 recording conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli (55:18), and a 2001 live recording conducted by Sir Colin Davis (54:47).
Read more about this topic: Symphony No. 1 (Elgar)
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