Sir Edward William Elgar - 1857 - 1934. An English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello, and two symphonies. He also composed choral works, including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924. Yet he felt himself to be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. In musical circles dominated by academics, he was a self-taught musician. Elgar married the daughter of a senior British army officer who inspired him both musically and socially, but he struggled to achieve success until his forties, when after a series of moderately successful works his Enigma Variations (1899) became immediately popular in Britain and overseas. He followed the Variations with a choral work, The Dream of Gerontius (1900), based on a Roman Catholic text that caused some disquiet in the Anglican establishment in Britain, but it became, and has remained, a core repertory work in Britain and elsewhere. His later full-length religious choral works were well received but have not entered the regular repertory.
In his fifties, Elgar composed a symphony and a violin concerto that were immensely successful. His second symphony and his cello concerto did not gain immediate public popularity and took many years to achieve a regular place in the concert repertory of British orchestras. Elgar's music came, in his later years, to be seen as appealing chiefly to British audiences. His fame began to revive significantly in the 1960s, helped by new recordings of his works. Some of his works have, in recent years, been taken up again internationally, but the music continues to be played more in Britain than elsewhere.
Elgar has been described as the first composer to take the gramophone seriously. Between 1914 and 1925, he conducted a series of acoustic recordings of his works. The introduction of the moving-coil microphone in 1923 made far more accurate sound reproduction possible, and Elgar made new recordings of most of his major orchestral works and excerpts from The Dream of Gerontius.
Of all his great works Elgar's miniatures were his own favourites, tunes that breathed the peaceful air of rural and Edwardian England.
On this video probably the most popular of the miniatures 'Chanson de Matin'. It was originally composed for violin and piano c.1889 and later orchestrated by the composer.
Enjoy this lovely peaceful classic from the great Englishman Sir Edward Elgar with scenes depicting a lovely yet bygone rural idyll.
Album Information:- Why not own this CD ......
Sir Edward Elgar
Chanson de Matin Op. 15 No.2
Barry Wordsworth & BBC Concert Orchestra;
The Last Night of the Proms Collection.
N.B. Apologies also for any unintended infringement of copyright. This video has not been made for any element of personal profit or gain.
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