Programme notes
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SESSION 1: STRINGS WEDNESDAY 15 JULY 7.30PM Elgar Serenade for Strings in E minor, Op. 20 Corelli Concerto Grosso in D, Op. 6 No. 1 Grieg Holberg Suite, Op. 40 Tonight’s concert journeys through two centuries of music written for string ensemble. At the turn of the 18th century, the Italian composer Arcangelo Corelli wrote a set of pieces for strings that would prove pivotal. Corelli didn’t set out to dazzle; rather to allow his instruments to sing out with elegance and concision. Corelli’s ‘Concerto Grosso’ also advanced new trends in ensemble writing that encouraged instruments or instrumental groups to double as soloists, varying the music’s textures in the process. In a sense, Edward Elgar’s aims were similar to Corelli’s, even though two centuries later the language of music was very different. Elgar’s Serenade includes feelings of wistfulness and undertones of loss, but still strives for a pleasantness of sound that comes from musical construction and an understanding of string instruments themselves. And Edvard Grieg’s Holberg Suite hails from less than ten years before Elgar’s work, even if its charming neo-Baroque footing would suggest it was far older.
Edward Elgar (1857–1934) Serenade for Strings in E minor, Op. 20 1 Allegro Piacevole 2 Larghetto 3 Allegretto Edward Elgar spent much of his early career working with non-professional musicians, directing various amateur ensembles – including one formed from the staff of the local asylum. It was for the Worcester Ladies’ Orchestra that Elgar wrote his Serenade for Strings in 1892, re-working musical material from up to four years earlier that had never made it off the cutting-room floor. ‘Pleasing’ or ‘agreeable’, implies the Piacevole title of the buoyant first movement. Listen out for the sustained rhythmic figure in the violas that lasts the course of the entire movement and serves as both an accompaniment and a theme. In the second movement Elgar appears at his distinctively noble and unmistakably English best as shapely, elegiac tunes sensitively overlap one another working towards a climax. But this climax has shades of the German music of Richard Wagner (perhaps this was a musical souvenir: Elgar had recently visited Wagner’s festival at Bayreuth). Wagner crops up in the last movement, too, in which the grace of the opening Piacevole prevails before Elgar references the Monsalvat Bells from the opera Parsifal in the work’s dying bars.
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