The British composer Edward Elgar holds the distinguished honor of being among the first in a long, long line of acquired British tastes. With his class resentments, addiction to nostalgia, and compulsive fetishization of the English countryside, he was more painfully English than Tennyson, Ray Davies and Basil Fawlty put together. For this, and for the slightly garish pomp of some of his more popular pieces, some listeners will forever find him distasteful. Even dedicated Elgar haters, however, have one piece whose genius they begrudgingly acknowledge: maybe it's The Dream of Gerontius, or his Cello Concerto, or his famous Enigma Variations — for many, it is this piece, written in 1910 at the height of his fame for uber-virtuoso Fritz Kreisler.

In this recording, it is played by modern uber-virtuoso Gil Shaham, and released on the violinist's Canary label. Shaham has been trotting the neverending superstar-violinist concerto circuit for nearly two decades now. Often, the monotony of this cycle — Bruch in Chicago on Thursday, fly to Cleveland for Sibelius on Saturday, Mendelssohn in New York the next week, repeat ad nauseam — proves the death of an original voice, smoothing away… read more »