2021 Elgar Festival in Worcester opens with ESO and top cellist Wallfisch

Raphael returns with a sequence of engaging miniatures for cello and strings arranged by Donald Fraser.

The programme opens with Elgar’s much loved Serenade, and concludes with the playful and witty “Little Music” for strings by the English String Orchestra’s former “Composer-in-Association”, Sir Michael Tippett. Finally, there’s a musical after-dinner sorbet, Evan Chambers virtuosic and hilarious setting of two Irish jigs,

The Tall-Eared Fox and the Wild-Eyed Man.

It’s an evening celebrating the best of English string music with one of the world’s most admired string orchestras, Worcester’s own English String Orchestra.

The concert begins at 7pm in Worcester Guildhall, with the opportunity to enjoy a pre-concert drink at 6pm to celebrate the opening of the festival.

Tickets are £15 (concert only) or £18 (concert plus glass of wine at 6pm). For tickets, click here or call – 01905 611427.

The Festival’s gala concert will celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Worcester Charter and takes place in the cathedral on Saturday, October 30, at 7.30pm.

Mark Wilde

The concert, entitled Celebrating Friendship and Community, will be led by the English Symphony Orchestra under their conductor Kenneth Woods in an all-British programme which includes Ralph Vaughan Williams’ evocative song-cycle On Wenlock Edge performed by tenor Mark Wilde, and Elgar’s well-loved Enigma Variations, which the composer dedicated “to my friends pictured within”.

Corra Sound

Corra Sound, a newly established professional chamber choir directed by Amy Bebbington, who is well-known as one of today’s most exciting emerging choral conductors and trainers, will be discovering works by less well-known female composers from Elgar’s time, alongside more contemporary works, in St Martin’s Church, London Road.

Dr Leah Broad

The concert will be preceded by a free, panel-discussion; Elgar in the Age of the Suffragettes, led by Dr Leah Broad.

Certain to be a ‘hot ticket’, one of the UK’s most innovative and exciting jazz ensembles, the Misha Mullov-Abbado Group, visit Worcester’s Guildhall for the Festival’s first ever late-evening Club Elgar concert of relaxed genre-bending music.

Audiences are promised a healthy dose of Elgar, but “as you’ve never heard him before”!

With recent lockdown restrictions making it near impossible for choirs to perform or rehearse, The Elgar Chorale together with their Director Piers Maxim, will give a much-anticipated performance, when they take their places in Old Saint Martin’s Church in The Cornmarket.

Stephen Johnson

The Elgar Society’s ‘A.T. Shaw Lecture’ welcomes leading broadcaster, author, critic and composer, Stephen Johnson to the Henry Sandon Hall to discuss ‘Innovation and Experimentation in Elgar’s First Symphony and the Enigma Variations’.

Committed to increasing the presence of music by living composers, a song recital From Elgar to Venables will feature tenor Mark Wilde and pianist David Owen Norris in Huntingdon Hall when they perform the premiere of a song-cycle by Worcester composer Ian Venables entitled The Last Invocation, based on poems by Walt Whitman.

Venables shares the programme with Elgar and another Worcestershire composer of the Victorian era, Walter Battisson Haynes.

Elgar for Everyone

The final afternoon culminates with the combined forces of the ESO Youth Orchestras, in the Festival’s Elgar for Everyone Family Concert at Severn Hall, Three Counties Showground in Malvern.

The concert brings together the young musicians of the three ESO Youth Orchestras alongside members of the English Symphony Orchestra for a celebration of musical renewal. In addition to works by Elgar and Hans Zimmer, the concert will have a special focus on the music of Elgar’s contemporary, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the mixed-race English composer and conductor hailed in his lifetime as the “African Mahler.”

For more details, visit elgarfestival.org