Symphony No. 3 (Elgar/Payne)

Edward Elgar's Third Symphony Op. 88 (posth.) was incomplete at the time of his death in 1934. Elgar left 130 pages of sketches, which the British composer Anthony Payne worked on for many years, producing a complete symphony in 1997, officially known as "Edward Elgar: the sketches for Symphony No 3 elaborated by Anthony Payne" or in brief "Elgar/Payne Symphony No 3". The first public performance was at the Royal Festival Hall on 15 February 1998, by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davis.
History.
After the death of his wife Caroline Alice Elgar in 1920, Elgar retreated into semi-retirement, producing no large-scale works. His friend and champion George Bernard Shaw held that the BBC should commission a new Elgar symphony, and with the aid of the British conductor and composer Landon Ronald he persuaded the BBC to do so. Elgar worked on the new piece during the last year of his life, jotting down short snatches of bars, as well as composing pages in full score.
Realising that he would not complete the score, the dying Elgar did not destroy the sketches, and made contradictory remarks about the unfinished work. He told his friend, the violinist William Henry Reed, "Don’t let anyone tinker with it", but to his doctor he said, "If I can’t complete the Third Symphony, somebody will complete it – or write a better one". Elgar and Reed had often played through various sketches for the symphony on violin and piano, and Reed knew more than anyone about Elgar's intentions. Reed reproduced more than forty pages of the most important sketches in his book "Elgar as I Knew Him", probably to illustrate what he believed to be the impossibility of weaving them into a coherent whole. Their publication in 1936 meant that seventy years later they went into the public domain, and the Elgar family were powerless to prevent anyone from developing the sketches.
In 1974, a BBC Radio 3 producer, Dr Roger Fiske, devised a programme about the Symphony, and orchestrated some of the sketches, completing Elgar's unfinished score and composing some other passages. Elgar's daughter Carice gave her approval and Sir Adrian Boult agreed to conduct the music. 
The score was sent for copying to Maurice Johnstone, a former BBC head of music. Johnstone felt strongly that the broadcast would amount to "tinkering" with the score and he successfully persuaded Boult to withdraw from the project on ethical grounds and the programme was subsequently dropped. A similar proposed feature for BBC television in 1979 also failed to materialise.
The British composer Anthony Payne had become interested in the sketches in 1972, and in 1993 the BBC invited him to work on them for a workshop performance. In the event the performance did not take place, because of objections from the Elgar family. Payne nevertheless continued to work on the sketches, completing the Scherzo, the Adagio and the first movement of the work. The Elgar family decided to commission Payne to make an authorised version. Payne later wrote, "It was during this process that I became more consciously aware of the overall sweep of the symphony. It was different in its sheer breadth of emotion from any of his other symphonic works: there was the raw vigour and magic lyricism of the opening movement, the use of a lighter manner in the second which went far beyond his established symphonic practice, and the searing intensity of the Adagio, tragic in its import, while the finale revealed a world of chivalric action and drama." 
His greatest difficulty was in completing the finale, as Elgar had left few clues about its structure and none about how it would end. Payne wrote both the entire development section and the coda. He decided to end the work quietly, following the model of 'The Wagon Passes' in Elgar’s "Nursery Suite". According to Payne, "The finale's main subject actually suggests this kind of treatment, and it would lead the music away into some new visionary world, spanning the years between the composer's death and my attempted realisation of his sketches. I trusted my intuition and went ahead and wrote".
The symphony was first heard in public during 1998 and 1999, when it was performed in Glasgow (24 September), Birmingham (25 September), Bristol (10 October/27 January), Liverpool (24 October), Manchester (17 December) and Cambridge (29 January). International performances were programmed as far afield as Brussels, Ljubljana, St Petersburg, Hong Kong and Winnipeg. The United States première took place on 20 November 1998 with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davis, followed by performances by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Davis and the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington with Leonard Slatkin.
The symphony was described by the philosopher Roger Scruton as "a brilliant and heartfelt recuperation of musical ideas and one that has helped to revitalise our musical culture".
Structure.
A performance of the symphony takes about 55 minutes.
Recordings.
The first recording was made for the NMC label by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, in October 1997, four months before the first public performance. Subsequent recordings include: