Childress Conducts Elgar

Pre-Concert Chat at 5:45 PM
Lawn Paver Bar

Bohdana Frolyak

Let There Be Light

Edward Elgar

Enigma Variations, Op. 36

Stephanie Childress returns to the podium to lead a concert featuring Elgar’s Enigma Variations. His best-known work, it starts off with a pensive four-note melody which Elgar then weaves into 14 variations. In each variation, he imagines how one of 13 of his friends might turn the theme into a different melody inspired in some way by their personality. The first variation is based on his wife, Alice, and the 14^th and final variation is Elgar’s own. It’s an orchestral masterpiece.

Alasdair’s take on the program:

As Brits, Stephanie Childress and I grew up with Elgar’s Enigma Variations as an indispensable part of our cultural heritage—it contains the entire range of human experience in one half hour!