Barenboim celebrates Elgar: 'It is music fit for universal consumption'

Mahler, Strauss and Toscanini were among those who championed his music, but Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Staatskapelle’s forthcoming London performance of Elgar’s second symphony is an important landmark for the composer’s international reputation

To Daniel Barenboim, as he put it in a discussion with journalists in Berlin last month, Edward Elgar is simply “a universal composer.” The great conductor is determined to stop his audiences from thinking of Elgar as English or British first and a composer second. And tomorrow evening, Barenboim will once again put his music-making where his mouth is, when he conducts at the Royal Festival Hall his Berlin Staatskapelle in Elgar’s E flat major second symphony, written in 1911.

This may not seem like a big deal to some. After all, Barenboim is one of the world’s great conductors. The Elgar second is without much argument a great symphony. What’s to remark upon when the two come together, as they will tomorrow in London and as they did in a 2013 recording with the Staatskapelle, which was recently voted - against competition from generations of home-grown Elgarians - the Building a Library choice on the Radio 3 programme?

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