Lauded as Critic’s Pick in both The Guardian and The Times, The Elgar Festival, an annual live celebration of the life and music of Worcester’s most famous son and Britain’s great composer, Sir Edward Elgar, returns to Worcester this summer.

Taking place at a number of integral venues of both historic interest and personal significance to the composer, the Festival comprises concerts given by the resident English Symphony Orchestra and their Conductor and Festival Artistic Director, Kenneth Woods and guest artists, and features composers working today as well as those luminaries of the past.

This year's Gala Concert takes place in Worcester Cathedral, where the English Symphony Orchestra and conductor Kenneth Woods perform “the greatest symphony of modern times” – Elgar’s Symphony No.1 – and his choral masterpiece, The Music Makers, with the Elgar Festival Chorus and mezzo-soprano, Jess Dandy.

Music of today is represented by this year’s Featured Composer, Michael Berkeley, and includes his ‘Visions of Piers Ploughman’; his musical response to the epic poem drawn from the Malvern Hills by William Langland, while ‘Secret Garden’ is one of his most colourful and ebullient works. Berkeley will also speak about Elgar’s legacy and what it means to composers today, and how a sense of place resonates in Edward Elgar’s music and the music of our own time.

A performance of Ian Venables’ Requiem, already a modern-day classic, by Worcester’s greatest living composer, will take place in Great Malvern Priory with the English Symphony Orchestra, Worcester Cathedral Chamber Choir and Saint Cecilia Singers, together with the orchestral suite from Elgar’s rarely-heard incidental music to Lawrence Binyon's play, King Arthur, which Michael Kennedy described as 'a superb score', and was partly reworked by Elgar for his unfinished final Symphony.

Worcester Guildhall will be the venue to hear the cream of English music for strings, including Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra and Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, played by the ESO String Orchestra. ESO Chamber Players perform Elgar’s String Quartet and Michael Berkeley’s thrilling Torque and Velocity.

Kenneth Woods swaps baton for guitar and welcomes some of the UK’s finest blues and jazz musicians to celebrate the music of Elgar, in ‘Blue Enigma’, and a concert from the Bandstand features Worcester Concert Brass in familiar works by Elgar and arrangements by Thea Musgrave, Lucy Pankhurst and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. 

There are free conducting masterclasses, a workshop, talks, a film and illuminating exhibitions, including the opportunity to view original manuscripts, letters, photographs and personal possessions, telling the story of how Worcester’s Ted Elgar became Sir Edward Elgar, First Baronet of Broadheath, as well as ’10 Things you Didn’t know about Elgar’, while a 30-minute film explores ‘Elgar’s Worcestershire’.

Elgar Festival returns from 30 May - 4 June. To view the programme, and to buy tickets, visit: elgarfestival.org

Image: Michael Whitefoot