ENGLISH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

                                                          Malvern Priory ****

In only a few years the Worcester-based Elgar Festival has grown into one of the major events on the concert calendar. attracting visitors from both home and abroad, hearing the music in the composer’s own surroundings.

So the beautiful Priory in Malvern, to all intents and purposes the capital of Elgarshire, was the perfect setting for a programme of string music by Elgar and his contemporaries (one of them only 6 when Elgar passed away).

Artistic director Kenneth Woods conducted a compact English Symphony Orchestra on willing top form in a gorgeous sequence of works with moonlight as the recurring theme, beginning with Elgar’s Serenade for Strings, flowing yet revealing tensile inner detail.

A comparative rarity followed, In Moonlight, a transcription for oboe and strings of the famous Canto Popolare solo viola interlude at the heart of the overture In the South. For all the gorgeously-phrased artistry of soloist Nicholas Daniel, the timbre of the oboe jarred when we have become so used to the mellifluous tones of the original. The effect was the same in the elegiac Chanson de Nuit, eloquently characterised by Daniel, but lacking in the soothing quality this noble little piece delivers from strings alone.

Then came the composer who was only 6 at Elgar’s death, this year’s Festival Featured Composer, Thea Musgrave, now 98 and still busy composing. as Nick Daniel enthusiastically told me. Here he offered  Musgrave’s Night Windows, dedicated to him, a multi-movement work capturing the many-sided essence of his instrument, now rhapsodic, now coruscating, and with a sense of lyrical regretfulness which takes the soloist gradually to the highest of pitches, beautifully accomplished.

There are two failings in the Festival’s programme-book: no actual notes as such, and the huge howler of listing the first piece after this concert’s interval as An American Interlude (a portrait of Janis) by Sibelius (Janis Joplin, I suspect).  This title was a leftover from last year, and the piece was in fact Rakastava, an early work drawn from Finnish folklore (there are some hints of the composer’s En Saga) and telling of two lovers. The remarkable ESO delivered every strand of texture with crystalline clarity while creating the maximum sonority, a feat which they managed with even greater success in the concluding offering, Schoenberg’s Verklaerte Nacht.

The story here is similar, drawing from the composer huge expressions of late German romanticism, and requiring of the strings heroic reserves of concentration and eloquence. Led by the legendary Zoe Beyers, Woods’ players unfolded a triumphant, empathetic account, utterly moving and compelling, and surely making a lot of friends for this cruelly maligned of composers.

Christopher Morley