Presents
Edward Elgar
Serenade for String Nonet in e minor, Op.20
Edward Elgar (1857-1934) was one of the leading figures in what has come to be known as the “second English Renaissance” and he was the first English composer since Henry Purcell (d.1695) of truly international standing. But all of that still lay in the future when he wrote his Serenade.. Elgar was a fine violinist, and spent most of his early career as a performer, but beginning in the late 1880s, he began to focus increasingly on composition. The Serenade is a much more smaller work, and seems to have been a revision of an earlier set of pieces he had composed in 1888, Much of his earliest orchestral music is light fare intended for small ensembles, but this is a much more substantial piece, in the tradition of the earlier Brahms and Dvorák serenades. Years later, Elgar described it as one of his personal favorites. Elgar’s background as a violinist allowed him to write particularly effective and idiomatic music for strings, and he described the Serenade—with tongue firmly in cheek—as “very stringy in effect.”
Dating from 1892-3, it is in three movements, beginning with wistful music marked Allegro piacevole (a “pleasing” Allegro). There is a underlying note of sadness in the main theme heard at the outset, and Elgar sets against this a more lilting middle section with brief solo turns for the principal violin. The long central Larghetto begins with an introduction that adapts ideas from the opening movement, but Elgar then introduces a gorgeous Romantic theme that is spun out in the same patient way as in his more famous “Nimrod” movement from the Enigma Variations. There is a brief contrasting interlude before this theme returns in the full orchestra. The movement ends in a whisper. The brief closing movement, Allegretto, returns to the Serenade’s opening mood, but in a more dancelike character.
Parts: $34.95
Parts & Score: $44.95
