Elegy for String Orchestra was written when Grace Williams had just started her career after finishing her studies with Ralph Vaughan Williams in London and with Egon Wellesz in Vienna. In this formative period, the two tendencies that inform the composer’s later output had begun to take shape: on one hand, Williams would refer to traditional Welsh folk tunes as an inspiration, and on the other, she would also utilise the modernist idioms which she acquired through her years of training as the technical basis.
While the earlier overture Hen Walia (1930) prefigures Williams’s folk-inspired works, Elegy demonstrates the composer’s early mastery of the modernist language. The music is built upon the first three pitches played by the second violins and the violas, which serve as the seed for subsequent transformations. After it reaches the climax over the syncopated violins and dissonant lower strings, the initial pitches resurface with a similar rhythmic profile on the first violins, signalling a reprise that gradually leads to the consonant chord at the end as a final redemption.
Concerts notes originally commissioned for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Saturday 12 February 2022 (event cancelled).
© Kelvin H. F. Lee