Solo songs with orchestra by Edward Elgar Score - Sheet Music

SKU: ST.EWE14

Elgar’s solo songs are not among his best known or best loved works and yet, among those for which he provided an orchestral accompaniment, there is a song cycle of world renown: Sea Pictures. In view of the significance of the cycle in Elgar’s output and her close association with the work, the volume has been dedicated to Dame Janet Baker.nnConsidering the popularity of Sea Pictures, his first venture into the genre, it is surprising that Elgar did not attempt to repeat his success with further song cycles. As the volume shows, he abandoned the two subsequent song cycles he embarked upon – those of Op.59 and Op.60 – when both were only half complete, and two of his stand-alone orchestral songs – Follow the Colours and The Kingsway – rank among those which many feel are better left unheard. And yet one of the other two completed songs which make up the volume is the moodily dramatic The Wind at Dawn, his earliest setting of words by his wife Alice and, again in the views of many, arguably his best.nnOne noticeable absentee from the volume is Elgar’s consummately restrained setting of Arthur Salmon’s poem Pleading. Published first in 1908 an arrangement for voice and piano, it has long been believed that Elgar added an orchestral accompaniment later the same year. But in the course of editing this volume, it became apparent that Elgar intended his later arrangement to be performed as a song without words, an orchestral miniature akin to his Three Bavarian Dances (which will thus appear in Vol.23). A further discovery in the course of editing was the autograph score of the orchestral arrangement of Follow the Colours, finally removing a long-held uncertainty that the orchestral accompaniment might not be Elgar’s own.nnThe volume is completed by the novelty ‘Smoking Cantata’, which claims to be written for a cast of thousands including a ‘Grand Chorus of Repentent Smokers’ but in fact contains a vocal line only for Elgar’s friend and host Edward Speyer; together with all known surviving fragments of three unfinished songs, two of which – Ozymandias and Callicles – clearly engaged Elgar’s sporadic attention over many years, leaving us with two incomplete settings of each. Edited by Emeritus Professor Julian Rushton, the volume also contains the customary academic apparatus of detailed source descriptions, commentaries and an introductory foreword. Another volume containing more than its fair share of fascinations for the academic, the performer and for those who simply enjoy Elgar’s music.