Elgar had long admired Shakespeare's plays, and when approached to 
write a piece for the 1913 Leeds Festival, determined on a symphonic 
portrayal of Falstaff. The character had been tackled before, most notably 
by Verdi in his opera; but Elgar considered the comic image of Falstaff 
as a bumbling buffoon, a figure of fun, merely superficial. He sought to 
produce a work that gave greater psychological insight into the character.

The result is an intensely programmatic and episodic work of 
considerable musical complexity. The piece can be enjoyed on several levels, including purely as a piece of virtuoso orchestral writing. Elgar constructs a breathtaking variation of the theme representing Prince Hal 
immediately preceding the dramatic climax of the work. We see in it the 
exhilaration of a chase across wide-open spaces, the sensation that drew 
Elgar so unswervingly to the Malvern Hills. 

Set in C Minor, the piece has a depth we associate with Beethoven’s Fifth,
and the canvas represents Elgar’s largest instrumental movement. This 
recording interpolates speeches from Henry IV, Parts I and II, to add dramatic
context to the performance.
George Chadwick (1854-1931) was Dean of the New England Conservatory.
He chose Robert Burns’ poem Tam O’Shanter (1790), written in English
and Scottish, for an orchestral treatment in 1915. A serious fantasy symphonic poem, 
it invokes gales, with acerbic horns and brashly vivacious writing for the horns. 
Other notable effects include the woodblocks that register exotically in a wild dance in the manner of Mussorgsky’s Night on the Bare Mountain, and the highly 
colored poetry of Rimsky-Korsakov. Some Scottish flavor appears, and the work 
ends in a repose reminiscent of Dvořák. Disc 2 omits the Shakespeare dialogue
and provides only the Elgar score.