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BUSY ELGAR FESTIVAL 2024
The kaleidoscope of offerings making up Elgar Festival 2024
is too generous to take in at one sitting, the near week-long event bringing
celebration, education, encouragement, surprise elements and even a car rally.
There is a strong local feel to the whole affair, reflecting
Elgar’s love of the Worcestershire countryside and in particular his affinity
with the Malvern Hills. And it is Malvern which brings us the car rally, the 2024 Morgan Sports Car Club rally, heading
off from the Morgan Motor Factory at 10.30am on May 28 and finishing at The
Firs (Elgar’s Birthplace), Lower Broadheath, from 3.30pm
The drivers can catch up there with the conclusion of a
two-day Conducting Masterclass (beginning on May 27, first day of the Festival).
Eight emerging conductors from all over the world will make a study of Elgar’s
music with the help of musicians of the English String Orchestra under the
guidance of Kenneth Woods and Jonathan Mann. Entry for the audience is free,
but tickets must be pre-booked.
Always a popular favourite, the Elgar for Everyone Family
Concert brings over 100 young musicians from across Elgar Country to perform in
Worcester Cathedral on May 29 (7.30pm), following two days of rehearsals and
workshops. Members of the English Symphony Orchestra are joined by the ESO’s
Youth Orchestras, and Festival Patron Julian Lloyd Webber and Festival Artist
in Residence Esther Abrami will co-host. The concert also includes the premiere
of the winning work in the Festival’s 2024 Young Composers Competition.
Thursday May 30 brings the first opportunity to meet Steve
Elcock, this year’s Festival’s featured composer. This self-taught British
composer now living in France will be in conversation with festival director
Kenneth Woods (The Firs, 1.30pm).
Immediately after this April Fredrick and Michele Lammas
lead an interactive talk and workshop about the soprano Jenny Lind, the
“Swedish Nightingale”, who at the end of her career retired to Wynds Point on
the Malvern Hills. During this exploration of the woman behind the legend April
Fredrick will perform “Qui la voce”, a Bellini aria which was a Lind favourite,
with violinist Grace Shepherd (The Firs, 3om: admission free to both events,
but tickets must be pre-booked).
Friday May 31 is a busy day for Esther Abrami, beginning in
the atmospheric and cosy Huntingdon Hall at 1pm with a lunchtime recital including
Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending and a selection of Elgar violin miniatures.
She will be performing later in the day, but before then
Kenneth Woods conducts the English String Orchestra in an intriguing programme
of British string music at the Worcester Guildhall (7pm). Imogen Holst
(daughter of the great Gustav) has re-emerged into our consciousness recently
thanks to Mark Ravenhill’s two-hand play about the difficult relationship between
Benjamin Britten and his assistant Imogen, “Ben and Imo” at the Swan Theatre,
Stratford-upon-Avon, and here the ESO picks up the baton with a performance of
her Variations on ‘Loth to Depart’. From Elizabethan times we move directly to
the present day for the world premiere of Steve Elcock’s Concerto Grosso, and
the concert concludes with the arrangement of Elgar’s great String Quartet for string
orchestra by David Matthews, himself an assistant to Britten.
But the evening is not yet over, for Esther Abrami returns,
now to a hastily-cleared Guildhall, for Club Elgar 1, a late-night evening chill here featuring
arrangements for violin and orchestra of film and TV scores, and so much other
music derived from the silver screen (9.30pm).
We go to sea next morning, when the Elgar Chorale under
Piers Maxim perform Isle of Beauty/By the Lone Seashore by Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor, a young mixed-race composer encouraged by Elgar, and whose Song
of Hiawatha stole some of the thunder of The Dream of Gerontius when both their
premieres were conducted by Hans Richter at the 1900 Birmingham Triennial
Festival. Elgar himself follows, with Donald Fraser’s adroit arrangement of the
Sea Pictures (St Martin in the Cornmarket, 11am).
Lunchtime brings a free event in the Guildhall (1.30pm) when
the Worcestershire Symphony Orchestra (which Elgar helped found in 1905) is
conducted by Keith Slade in works by Vivaldi and Bach as well as Elgar’s great
Introduction and Allegro (incidentally, keep an eye out for Slade, who am I
told is due to conduct all three great Stravinsky Diaghilev ballets on one
evening in Birmingham next year).
Remaining in the Guildhall, 3.30pm sees the Jenny Lind Singers
in concert, performing works by female and local composers, including the world
premiere of their commission from Liz Dilnot Johnson, “Nimrod Reimagined” for
Elgar’s birthday.
Worcester Cathedral is the venue at 7.30 for the Elgar
Festival Gala Concert, Kenneth Woods conducting the English Symphony Orchestra
in Elgar’s Violin Sonata, Zoe Beyers the popular soloist, his Cockaigne
Overture, and Pomp and Circumstance Marches. They also perform Steve Elcock’s epic
tone poem Wreck.
Woods swaps his baton for guitar for a late-night blues
concert, when Elgar 2 takes over the Henry Sandon Hall at the Royal Porcelain
Works in Severn Street, with a programme reimagining how Elgar’s themes might
have sounded threaded through blues history (10.15pm).
The nearby Museum of Royal Worcester is also the venue for the A.T. Shaw Lecture
on June 2, Elgar’s Birthday, with Festival Patron Julian Lloyd Webber sharing his close relationship with the Elgar
Cello Concerto (11am, refreshments from 10.30am, admission free).
Back to the Royal Porcelain Works at 2pm for Elgar’s Piano Quintet
performed by the ESO Chamber Players, and preceded by the world premiere of Steve
Elcock’s Piano Quintet, following the scoring of Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet
(violin, viola, cello and bass).
The rest of the day is completed with various
acknowledgements of the Birthday, including Choral Evensong in Worcester
Cathedral at 4pm, ending with the laying of a wreath at the Elgar Memorial Window.
All these events are set against a background of
exhibitions, workshops and relaxed concerts throughout the week, but they are
also set against a background of concern for the funding future of subsequent
Festivals. Arts Council England’s swingeing cuts to the funding of so many of
the country’s most respected institutions have spread to the Elgar Festival,
regarded as not inclusive enough, and
centred on a composer of apparently insufficient interest.
We all know both criticisms are rubbish, given the overall
theme of the Festival as “Elgar for Everyone” and its deliberate provision of
concerts for people living with disabilities, dementia and other challenges,
and given the huge international interest in Elgar, which draws visitors from
all over the world to Worcester and the Malverns, with all their
spending-power.
Should anyone wish to help swell the coffers, please follow
the link https://www.gofundme.com/f/elgar-festival-2024.
All Festival details on www.elgarfestival.org.
Christopher Morley