Priya Mitchell, violin
Dirk Mommertz, piano
Reto Bieri, clarinet
Hugo Ticciati, violin
Tetiana Lutsky, violin
Marc Sabbah, viola
Biran O’Kane, cello
Julius Drake, piano

Programme:
MacMillan Kiss on wood
Sally Beamish The Flittin’
Elgar Piano Quintet, op.84

Elgar’s magnificent piano quintet is one of his last masterpieces, written at the end of the Great War which destroyed the world he had grown up in, with all its stability and self-confidence. Here Elgar’s inimitable grandeur, with its usual traces of doubt, encloses a deeply moving, elegiac slow movement, and indeed echoes of the war itself. Before the quintet, MacMillan’s haunting meditation on the wood of Christ’s cross, and Sally Beamish’s commission for our 2018 Festival, about leaving her Scottish home of many years, to return to England