Description
In 1878 Edward Elgar (then just 21), his brother Frank and friends Frank Exton and Hubert and Willie Leicester, used to meet on Sunday afternoons to rehearse in a shed behind his father’s music shop in Worcester. With two flutes, an oboe, a clarinet and a bassoon (played by a self-taught Elgar), this was not an orthodox wind quintet grouping, so Elgar arranged and wrote new work for the group.
Elgar gave the works the collective title ‘Shed Music’ and, whilst there are a couple of more substantial works, the majority – including the Andante con Variazione – are short but delightful miniatures offering tantalising glimpses of Elgar’s emerging style.
In May Edward wrote an Andante with variations, named after the nearby town of Evesham (where at the beginning of the month he played violin in a performance of the Messiah with his father and uncle). The Andante was a satisfied little tune: but the theme and every variation was punctuated with a two-bar postlude falling away through the triad in miniature farewell. There were variations for solo bassoon and oboe. One variation sent its accompaniment through daring chromatics in slow motion. The whole finished up with a ‘perpetuum mobile’ in conventional semiquavers led by the flute of Hubert Leicester, to whom the piece was dedicated. Extracted from Jerrold Northrop Moore’s “Edward Elgar: A Creative Life”.
Elgar’s Shed Music was lost for nearly 100 years before being rediscovered and broadcast on the BBC in 1976. Elgar’s music has been re-arranged here for the standard wind quintet grouping of flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon.
