'Downton Abbey' era composer opens our Season Finale
Lord Grantham and Lady Mary will, unfortunately, be absent from our concert this weekend.
But one of the composers they surely would have know—had they been actual people and not fictional TV characters—would have been Sir Edward Elgar.
Here's a snippet from our program notes about Elgar and his great Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, Op. 39. Notes written by Dr. Luke Howard.
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Sir Edward Elgar’s music is often described as being quintessentially “British,” an expression of Victorian/Edwardian grace, with judicious touches of wit, and suitably “stiff-upper-lip” correctness.
Nowhere are these traits more evident than in his best-known work, the first of the “Pomp and Circumstance” Marches. Elgar eventually wrote five “Pomp and Circumstance Military Marches,” the first two dating from 1901 and the last from 1930. (A sixth March was created posthumously in 2006 from Elgar’s sketches.)
But it was the first—a “frantic” success at its 1901 premiere—that lives on as a traditional graduation march at American high-school and college ceremonies, and as a staple in the “Last Night of the Proms” concerts in London.
Its middle section was turned into a British patriotic hymn, “Land of Hope and Glory,” in 1902.
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Come enjoy an exciting night of Pomp and Circumstance and lots of exciting music from the great European composers.
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See you soon!
Dr. Douglas Pew, Associate Conductor