A Strad, a Welshman and Elgar’s elegy
For an English classic, get in a Welshman. The BBC Symphony Orchestra’s strategy when it comes to the First Night of the Proms might sound a little counterintuitive, but there are few cellists out there who know Elgar’s Cello Concerto better than Paul Watkins. And there are certainly no cellists who know this orchestra any better: Watkins played with them as lead cellist for seven years, in the era when Andrew Davis was the chief conductor.
“It’s just one of those seminal pieces that comes on to your radar before anything else,” he says of the Elgar. “I remember being 10 years old and really desperately wanting to get a score of it. I managed to persuade my parents and I’ve been playing it ever since.”
His interpretation of this harrowing work, the composer’s sobering response to the cataclysm of the First World War, has changed over the years. “When I was in my late teens and early twenties I saw it with a bit more anger, railing against the world, but I don’t see it that way now. It’s a deeply nostalgic piece, and, as with all Elgar, even though he was quite a bitter man, it doesn’t come out in his music.”
How do you improve on the piece that has now been heard countless times in Elgar’s birthday year? Watkins has already played it at the Proms before, back in 1993. But now he has an ace up his sleeve – a Stradivarius that he’s borrowed from the Royal Academy’s lustrous collection. “Ideally I’d have it for the rest of my life,” he quips (he gets only a month to rehearse with the precious instrument). “It’s got incredibly rich harmonic overtones – and probably its great glory is the A string, which is great for the Elgar as so much of the melodic material is carried on that string.”
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Watkins is confident that the combination of rapt First Night atmosphere and the silky Strad will conquer the Albert Hall’s notoriously tricksy acoustic. “In the Albert Hall you can’t hope for the instrument to reach everybody with the same immediacy. It comes down to the quality of the performance. Sometimes you have to hypnotise the lot of them.”