An Interview with Ken Woods, Artistic Director of The Elgar Festival

With the Elgar Festival due to take place in less than two months time, we caught up with its Artistic Director Ken Woods, to talk about all things Elgar.

The Elgar Festival is now in its 7^th year.  What do you attribute its success too?

Elgar! I mean, how can you go wrong with a festival celebrating the greatest composer this country has produced in the city of his birth? But it has helped immeasurably that we’ve built a very strong leadership team, with a committed and active board and an outstanding Executive Director, my colleague Sue Voysey. 

What in your view are some of the highlights for this year’s Festival?

Well, Elgar’s Second Symphony is the obvious pinnacle. We did Elgar’s First Symphony two years ago. That performance, which is coming out on CD and currently streaming, remains one of the most memorable of my entire musical life. Hearing the great Elgar works in Worcester Cathedral with the English Symphony Orchestra, who know this music better than anyone, is just as good as it gets.
But it really is a feast of music and ideas. I’m fascinated to see the Notes from the Loft concert with the ESO winds. The Elgar for Everyone Family Concert is always thrilling. We’re welcoming back our great friend Raphael Wallfisch for a very exciting recital, and April Fredrick and Eric McElroy, who is one of today’s most exciting young composers, are also doing a song recital.

What does your role as Festival Director comprise of?

Thankfully, it is a testament to our incredible team that my role has evolved a great deal. In the first year, I was as much ‘chief cook and bottle washer’ as Artistic Director. As our family of volunteers, trustees, freelancers and Sue has grown, I’ve been more and more able to focus on programming the events, developing the themes and helping to bring the music to life. 

Tell us about how you discovered Elgar

As a young cellist growing up in Wisconsin, I would go to the record store and buy anything that had a cello piece on it. One day, I came home with the Elgar Cello Concerto. The rest is history. I still pinch myself every year when I think about conducting Elgar in front of the very Malvern Hills I would try to picture in my bedroom all those decades ago. 

Tell us about the launch of the Elgar Festival Live series of recordings on ESO Records; is that a first for the festival?

I believe it is. One thing COVID taught us is that the potential to reach wider audiences online is huge. Why limit the impact of your concert to one day? We hope these recordings will be a calling card for the festival and the orchestra, and help to bring Elgar’s music to a wider international audience.

What is Ian Venables’ involvement in the festival and can you tell us a bit more about him and why he is pivotal to the festival?

Well, I don’t think Ian would be offended if I described him as Worcester’s second-greatest composer…. After Elgar, of course. Ian is a wonderful composer with a special affinity for the human voice who has been described as Britain’s greatest living composer of art song. He’s celebrating a significant birthday this year, which is a wonderful excuse to welcome him as Visiting Composer and to celebrate his incredible musical legacy with our audiences.

What was behind introducing ESO Digital webstreams?  What do you think they will achieve?

It grew out of COVID. ESO was one of the first UK orchestras to present online concerts during lockdown, but we quickly realised that streaming was a powerful tool. While many other orchestras’ streaming efforts focused on mainstream offerings and petered out after a few weeks or month, ESO has shared dozens of world premieres and lost works of the past with an international audience regularly now for five years. There is a whole body of substantial works in our archive that you literally can’t hear anywhere else in the world. 

The Elgar Festival which takes place from Saturday 24 May until Sunday 1 June this year.

The English Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1980 and is The International Orchestra of Elgar Country.

For further information and to book tickets please visit www.elgarfestival.org