Sir Edward William Elgar (1857 – 1934) was an English
composer, many of whose works have entered the British
and international classical concert repertoire. Among
his best-known compositions are orchestral works
including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and
Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin Aand cello,
and two symphonies. He also composed choral works,
including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and
songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in
1924.
Although Elg...(+)
Sir Edward William Elgar (1857 – 1934) was an English
composer, many of whose works have entered the British
and international classical concert repertoire. Among
his best-known compositions are orchestral works
including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and
Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin Aand cello,
and two symphonies. He also composed choral works,
including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and
songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in
1924.
Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English
composer, most of his musical influences were not from
England but from continental Europe. He felt himself to
be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. In
musical circles dominated by academics, he was a
self-taught composer; in Protestant Britain, his Roman
Catholicism was regarded with suspicion in some
quarters; and in the class-conscious society of
Victorian and Edwardian Britain, he was acutely
sensitive about his humble origins even after he
achieved recognition. He nevertheless married the
daughter of a senior British Army officer. She inspired
him both musically and socially, but he struggled to
achieve success until his forties, when after a series
of moderately successful works his Enigma Variations
(1899) became immediately popular in Britain and
overseas. He followed the Variations with a choral
work, The Dream of Gerontius (1900), based on a Roman
Catholic text that caused some disquiet in the Anglican
establishment in Britain, but it became, and has
remained, a core repertory work in Britain and
elsewhere. His later full-length religious choral works
were well received but have not entered the regular
repertory.
In his fifties, Elgar composed a symphony and a violin
concerto that were immensely successful. His second
symphony and his cello concerto did not gain immediate
public popularity and took many years to achieve a
regular place in the concert repertory of British
orchestras. Elgar's music came, in his later years, to
be seen as appealing chiefly to British audiences. His
stock remained low for a generation after his death. It
began to revive significantly in the 1960s, helped by
new recordings of his works. Some of his works have, in
recent years, been taken up again internationally, but
the music continues to be played more in Britain than
elsewhere.
Elgar has been described as the first composer to take
the gramophone seriously. Between 1914 and 1925, he
conducted a series of acoustic recordings of his works.
The introduction of the moving-coil microphone in 1923
made far more accurate sound reproduction possible, and
Elgar made new recordings of most of his major
orchestral works and excerpts from The Dream of
Gerontius.
Source: Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Elgar).
Although originally composed for Chorus (SATB) & Organ,
I created this arrangement of "Ave Maria" (Op. 2 No. 2)
for Winds (Flute, Oboe, French Horn & Bassoon) &
Strings (2 Violins, Viola & Cello).