Brilliant 1962 music documentary

Reminiscing recently about a holiday in the Malvern Hills, sent me on a YouTube search for the 1962 Ken Russell documentary about Sir Edward Elgar.

The documentary has been uploaded in four parts but it’s the opening of the film that I remember most of all.

If you’ve never seen this documentary the first couple of minutes are fantastic.

Between 1959 and 1970, Ken Russell directed documentaries for the BBC Monitor and Omnibus arts programmes.

His best known works during this period include: Elgar (1962), The Debussy Film (1965), Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World (1967), Song of Summer (about Frederick Delius and Eric Fenby, 1968) and Dance of the Seven Veils (1970), a film about Richard Strauss.

Elgar was the first televised arts programme about an artistic figure made as a feature-length film rather than a series of shorter segments. It was also the first time that re-enactments were used. Russell fought with the BBC over using actors to portray different ages of the same character in addition to the traditional photograph stills and documentary footage.