Sir Mark Elder & Gautier Capuçon

Happiness is fleeting

‘Azinheira’, the Portuguese word for a venerable tree, the holm oak, is the title of a composition by Hannah Eisendle from 2024. Particularly in Portugal, where devastating forest fires rage time and time and again during the now regular drought-stricken summers, the reawakening of nature each spring takes on a significance that is more than merely metaphorical. Beauty and love find intense expression in Edward Elgar’s great Cello Concerto of 1919. A year after the end of the First World War, the 62-year-old composer, with wise transfiguration, manages to evoke some of the most fundamental values of human existence. Richard Strauss is accused of having done the opposite 20 years earlier: vainly reflecting himself in ‘A Hero’s Life’. On closer listening, the supposed ‘life of a braggart’ proves to be thoroughly ironic. Thank goodness!