Elgar - Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 84 (1918)

Quintet in A minor for Piano and String Quartet, Op. 84 (1918, premiered 1919)

I. Moderato - Allegro (00:01)
II. Adagio (13:59)
III. Andante - Allegro (27:00)

A wonderful chamber work for piano and string quartet by English composer Edward Elgar (1857-1934), which he dedicated to Ernest Newman, music critic of the Manchester Guardian. According to Alice Elgar, the atmospheric, ominous quality of the music is a reflection of the natural setting of Elgar's Sussex cottage at Flexham Park near Brinkwells, where he stayed during the summer of 1918. Indeed, Elgar's biographer W. H. "Billy" Reed has compared Flexham Park to the "Wolf's Glen" in Weber's opera "Der Freischütz". Some musicologists have connected Elgar's description of the opening movement as "ghostly stuff" and hints in Alice Elgar's description that the work might have a programmatic basis to conclude that Edward Bulwer-Lytton's occult novel "A Strange Story" forms a "quasi-programme" underlying the Quintet, as Elgar had ordered a few Bulwer-Lytton novels from the London Library at the time. Whether or not this is true, the Quintet's purely musical content is fascinating enough to merit close listening and analysis (which is why I've provided the score in the video).

Piano: Ian Brown
Sorrel Quartet

Viewers at an academic institution may access this analysis of Elgar's Quintet by Michael Allis, which argues for the Edward Bulwer-Lytton connection:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mal/summary/v085/85.2allis.html

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[otterhouse]

What a work yuo have put in to this!!! Thank you very much... I hope you will do more of these projects in the future, adding a score is really an added experience on youtube...

Greetings from the Netherlands, Rolf

[musicanth]

@otterhouse You're welcome! If time will allow, I'll add more videos of chamber music + score in the future.

[anyalun115]

love it

[DualThunder]

haha read at the bottom that the analysis was written by Michael Allis. He's one of my tutors at university. Incredibly nice guy and a brilliant teacher!

[olizfulovlov]

Thank you very much for posting this and thank you for the score!! Greetings from Croatia :-) I am gonna play this piece next month with my quartet and this has been extremely helpful!! Thank you again!

[ueblondon]

the third movement is such a total beauty...very brahms...I'll be stuck on this for a while.

[millriv]

Dear Musicanth: What you have done by having the score along with the audio is absolutely amazing and I know took hours of work. BRAVO TO YOU!!!!!!!

[Angelblade717]

Wow it helps SO much to have the score on the video along with the music :)

[barbararoxananunn]

thanks so much for this! I still cannot play it all ( on my cello) but at least I won't let the others down too badly when we get together!

[AdventConsular]

The adagio is so profound... rest in the peace and light of eternity, dear Elgar.

[cellohickey]

This is SO WONDERFUL, I can't thank you enough in just a few words left in a YouTube comment...

[radstainforth]

Excellent!