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 Six Promenades – are short, but delightful, miniatures. Charming as they are, they also contain some rather daring harmonic experimentation and there are clear and tantalising glimpses of Elgar’s emerging style.
In common with a number of his other wind quintets, three of the Six Promenades are given whimsical subtitles, presumably of personal significance: ‘Madame Taussaud’s’ (sic), ‘Somniferous’, and ‘Hell and Tommy’. Elgar liked the fifth movement enough to incorporate it into his much later work, the Severn Suite (1930).
