New album
Gareth Farr | Edward Elgar
Throughout the process of shaping and rediscovering the concertos of Farr and Elgar, my performances became imbued with a duty of remembering and a unique approach that allowed me to mirror these two concertos.
The styles of the two works are very different, but there are similarities in their musical forms: they start and end with an emblematic theme and feel like ritual works – almost requiems. They are universal in scope and rooted in personal dramas connected to the First World War. Elgar was deeply affected by the slaughter in the trenches – at night he could hear the shelling from France from his house in Fittleworth, West Sussex – and may have been thinking of the death in battle of his ex-fiancée Helen Weaver’s son when he started work on the concerto. He completed it in 1919, when the Spanish flu continued to claim many young people’s lives. It was to be his final large-scale work.
Gareth Farr composed his concerto in memory of his three great-granduncles who were all killed in the Great War. Farr completed his concerto two days before the birth of my daughter Stella, in March 2017, and gave me an incredible gift by incorporating the name S.T.E.L.L.A. (E flat–B–E–A–A–A) into the final cadence, which symbolically represents HOPE.
At 100 years apart these two concertos are the testimony of the tragic years 1914–1918. But where there is life, hope is always reborn.
