Featured composer Steve Elcock
Join Elgar Festival’s Featured Composer for 2024, Steve Elcock, for an informal ‘in conversation’ session exploring his experiences as a British self-taught composer now living in France, hosted by festival director Kenneth Woods.
Free entry but tickets should be pre-booked.
Thursday 30th May 1:30pm
The Firs
Elgar’s Birthplace
Lower Broadheath WR2 6RH
This event is free, but you should still book as space is limited
Or call Worcester Theatres on 01905 611427.
Steve Elcock in Conversation
Edward Elgar is surely one of music’s greatest autodidacts, an essentially self-taught composer who rose to become the greatest and most important British composer of all time. But Elgar is not an isolated case – Sir Michael Tippett and Philip Sawyers are also fascinating examples of self-taught composers who have written some of the most compelling music of the last 100 years.
Steve Elcock, the current John McCabe Composer-in-Association with the English Symphony Orchestra, and also self-taught, shares his powerful story of finding his voice as a symphonist far from the intrigues and access of the classical music establishment.
GRAMOPHONE (October 2017) “It is humbling that a self-taught European composer in his sixties can have written such a stack of well-crafted, emotionally honest and non-derivative music without anybody really noticing and with hardly a note being performed professionally”
ARCANA (Richard Whitehouse) “Toccata Classics continues its coverage of Steve Elcock (b1957) with this second instalment of orchestral music – dominated by the Fifth Symphony with provocative allusions to its most famous predecessor, together with shorter yet distinctive pieces from either end of his output.”
Jean Lacroix, Crecendo Magazine (June 2020) “…une vaste aventure tourmentée, souvent violente et aux aspérités rythmiques… “
Ralph Graves (September 2020) “Elcock has a strong musical personality, and his works show great originality. Plus, they have an internal logic that guides the listener through the music.”
Richard Hanlon (Musicweb international 2019) “Features of Elcock’s style that strike the listener more or less instantly (…) are the confidence and fluency of his writing, a seemingly infinite melodic and harmonic imagination, an unerring sense of purpose and direction…”
Chris Rice (Records International, May 2020) “For the first fifty seconds we seem set for an epic battle scene depicted in a violent symphonic allegro. But, more shockingly, the conflagration blows itself out and what follows is revealed to be a huge slow movement; a hushed, withdrawn, shell-shocked adagio of unrelenting tension and unease”
Geoffrey Atkinson (BMS review, June 2018) “Wow! As Schumann was prone to say, ‘Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!”