Diving into Elgar's Seascape
Dame Janet Baker’s famous 1965 recording of Elgar’s Sea Pictures is the touchstone by which others are judged. Michael Quinn talks to two of today’s brightest mezzo-sopranos, Kathryn Rudge and Elīna Garanča, about their very different readings of the under-appreciated but beautiful, mysterious song cycle.
Composed and forever confined between two defining masterpieces, Edward Elgar’s Sea Pictures has long been something of a Cinderella figure in the composer’s otherwise revered output. And, for that matter, in the story of the British art song.
A cycle of five songs that share images of the sea, Sea Pictures was written in the summer of 1899...
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