Elgar Festival 2025 - Elgar's Wind Quintets ‘Notes from the organ loft’

In addition to playing bassoon in a woodwind quintet (two flutes, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon) with his brother Frank, the young Edward Elgar wrote seven pieces of “Harmony Music” beginning in 1878, seven years before the publication of his Opus 1. The players for whom Elgar wrote the quintets were his young friends, who met regularly for music on Sunday afternoons in a garden shed behind his father’s shop.